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Possible Duplicate:
How to remove Ubuntu and put Windows back on?

I just put Ubuntu 12.10 on my brand new laptop, and my display driver did not work correctly. When I tried to fix the driver by using a generic ATI driver, the computer refused to boot to the desktop on Ubuntu.

It also won't let me boot to Windows 8, and gives two errors: error: can't find command 'drivemap' and something about an invalid efi.

I tried to get to Windows by bypassing the boot in bios, but it booted and a sad-face (literally) came up on Windows for a split second and said "sorry, windows has to reboot..." and then reboots to the startup screen that asks which os to use.

When I send Ubuntu into recovery mode, to do anything, it tells me I have to change to read/write mode and then locks up when I said yes. I had to cold shut down.

Please help. I can get to the terminal in Ubuntu but that is all. How can I remove Ubuntu from my laptop so I can use it again?

Community
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user127422
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2 Answers2

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Uninstalling an operating system is rather a misconception. You seem to have a computer that is set up to use UEFI. Apart from deleting the partition that contains the OS you want to remove, you should delete the UEFI boot entries, which can be done using efibootmgr in Linux running in UEFI mode or the UEFI Shell running from a USB stick, as well as removing the corresponding files from the EFI system partition.

EFI's intention was to make things easier, instead it added another layer of complexity.

If you don't want to use UEFI and you don't plan on using a harddrive greater than 2TB, the easiest way would be to disable UEFI funtionality, partiton your harddrive with a legacy MBR/MS-DOS partition table and reinstall your prefered operating systems, after you have made your backups of course.

Going the other route, I would recommend reading the UEFI related articles on the Arch Linux Wiki and the Ubuntu documentation as you can break many things when fuzzing with the wrong EFI entries.

LiveWireBT
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There are ways to uninstall Ubuntu and repair the boot from LiveCDs, such as GParted or boot-repair-disk. As for command line operations, I'm not entirely sure. Even if you did uninstall Ubuntu from within Ubuntu, you would have no way to restore your Windows boot without the Windows repair CD (which you could probably use right now to restore the Windows bootloader) or some other form of live Linux OS.

If you can burn a live CD or USB then I recommend using Ubuntu 12.04 live. Install GParted in the live session and delete your Linux partition, then either install boot-repair to boot Windows through GRUB (might not work since there's no Linux partition) or install 12.04.

Alex
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