How to properly uninstall Linux?

[Hanzou]

I have Linux installed on my hard drive along with windows XP. I want to uninstall it and install it on another drive. So my question is what is the proper way to uninstall it so that linux and the linux bootloader will be gone and Windows will boot up without asking? Shoudl i just uninstall the partitions belonging to Linux (Root and swap in this case)? I ask this becuase before I did something with a partition and the bootloader went nuts and I couldnt load windows at all, I had to reinstall the bootloader again.

 

[drag]

Probably easiest would be to keep the linux install on that drive. When you get a new drive put linux on that and install the linux bootloader over the old one. Then format the old linux root. As long as you keep the partition stuff straight in your head you shouldn't have a issue. One you get the new linux install going then you can delete the old one and still be able to control the bootloader easily.


Other then that, just do the windows repair stuff to get the windows bootloader going and then delete the linux partitions. Just make sure that you have a boot up disk, windows repair disk or something handy in case something goes wrong. Then you can install the Linux bootloader on the new disk and then use the BIOS's boot device select to switch over to the second disk and use that as the main bootloader to dual boot. That way if you ever uninstall Linux you will always have a decent windows bootloader to run off on on the original disk.

 

[cleverhandle]

It depends on the bootloader (LILO/Grub) and on where you installed it in the first place. For LILO, you can run lilo -u - that will uninstall LILO and restore whatever was in it's place before. After that, you can just delete the partitions. I don't know how Grub handles it, but the man/info page or the web should help you out.

If you've got the XP CD, it may be faster to just not worry about it, wipe the partitions, boot to the recovery console, and do a fixboot and fixmbr.