How do I uninstall a dual-booted Ubuntu partition safely?
 

So, awhile ago I installed Ubuntu on my laptop, dual booting it with Windows 7. In my opinion, Ubuntu is the superior operating system, but due to it not running any of my games, I end up just using Windows. It's too much of a pain to switch between them when I'm done with work and want to play some Starcraft or whatever.

My hard drive is filling up, and I gave my Linux distribution too much of the hard drive when I first installed it. I tried resizing it with Gparted, but the option to re-size was greyed out and I couldn't be bothered to fix it. Since I never use Linux anymore, I figure I might as well just uninistall Ubuntu.

How do I do this safely? Do I just go into partition manager and delete it? If I do, what will happen to the operating-system-selector program when I boot? Finally, will it just be a matter of extending my windows partition from windows to reclaim the used space? On another note, my laptop is a dell computer that did not come with any sort of windows recovery disk if that affects any steps I might have to take.

Thanks for any help, and I hope to go back to linux in the future.

Hello,

What you could do is download the stand alone gparted ISO image, burn it to disc, and then boot from it. From there, you should most likely be able to resize your partitons, delete, etc. Most likely, you ran gparted from within ubuntu, and you need to unmount the device(s) that you need to work on in order to do what you need to.

Cheers,

Josh

If you remove Ubuntu, you will need to restore the Windows7 master boot record so you can boot Windows7. There are numerous tutorials on the net for how to do that. Just do a google search for
"fix master boot record Windows 7".
I can not post any of those tutorials here since I am at work and my employer's web filtering software will not allow me to get to those websites.
Your other option would be to use the GParted live CD to shrink the Ubuntu partition. Then you could expand the Windows partition to take up the space that is created after you shrink Ubuntu.

And welcome to the LQ forums!

On the other hand you can try some of the 36 kazillion games that run on linux. They're fun too. ;) For example,
ciao,
jdk

You may want to have a look here, you didn't delete the Linux partition yet, but the steps to recover the Windows bootloader will work nonetheless. After that just delete the Linux partition and resize the Windows partition, you can use the Windows partition manager for that.

Thanks for the replies, all. I'll look into everything in the morning.

If you do not have a proper Windows7 recovery CD, since most OEM manufacturers do not seem to include them with their computers anymore despite the fact that you paid for a Windows license, you can download free Windows7 recovery CDs from here: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/window...disc-download/

EDIT: It seems that neosmart now charges for those CDs. You can still get free CDs here: http://cybernetnews.com/windows-7-recovery-disc/
And here is a tutorial for creating your own Windows7 recovery CD: http://createrecoverydisk.com/create...recovery-disk/

I have successfully removed the linux partition and rexpanded my windows partition. I will probably reinstall some distribution of linux, just one a little more lightweight and stick it in a smaller partition.

Thanks for the help!

If you just want to try Linux you cand do that easily with Virtualbox, that way you don't have to repartition the disk or install a Linux bootloader on your disk.