I have a problem, my daughter want the ubuntu removed from her laptop. It seems that it is hard to remove the person doing it for her has had no end of trouble. I would have thought putting a copy of fdisk or a partitioning program at startup would have done the trick.
She wants to put vista back on for some strange reason.
Any idea's.
Regards

Terry

Uh - just put in the VisDuh installer CD and set the BIOS to boot from CD before HD. VisDuh won't even recognize the ubuntu partition so it will ask if you want to format the HD.

tried that no joy

Terry

What's on the disk - can you afford to lose everything???

nothing on the disk that cannot be replicated.

Terry

The M$oft installers need to find free (unallocated) space on the disk, or partitions they know about - FAT or NTFS. Primary partitions.
In a situation like yours, I just erase the bootloader and partition table - Vista will see it as an uninitialized disk.
From a terminal session, run this: everything will be lost (your call)Presumes sda is your boot disk - "df" will generally tell you.

If you have the Ubuntu disk, boot from that.
Then you can find out what it calls your hard disk:
mount

(I'm assuming it mounts the disks that it discovers; that makes life easier to find out what these disks are.)

The wipe the disk with fdisk - for example:

sudo fdisk /dev/hda

Go through deleting all partitions. Try the MS installer again. If it still doesn't work, create a partition as 'If you create new partitions, you need to change the 'partition type' to HPFS/NTFS (7). It shouldn't matter that the partition is not formatted; the MS installer should run. Then again - who knows - MS have done an unbelievably bad job seeing how you've plugged the disk in and booted but the installer refuses to work.

It might be kind of a longshot, but does vista support installation to SATA drives out of the box? I'm not sure that it does, in which case, just like XP, you need a floppy with drivers for your motherboards SATA controllers. They are used when it says to press F6 for third party driver install etc. At lease thats the case in XP. I've never installed vista.

Laptops often come with "rescue partitions" that would probably be wiped out by the ubuntu installation

There is a chance you can find a BIOS option to allow for the disk to be seen as IDE during the installation. Look for such options, or anything mentioning AHCI

If nothing of the above works, you might need to build your own custom vista dvd using a program such as vlite and integrating all those drivers yourself in that cd

Then again it might have nothing to do with SATA and all that I wrote is useless, but the fact that it doesn't even see the drive makes it at least a suspect. Ubuntu may be just a red herring.

I've had this problem before where fdisk (winblows) will not remove the ubuntu root partition. restart machine and change runlevel to 3 (single user mode). as the root user run fdisk and delete all partitions (make sure there is absolutley nothing there) save the partition table and reboot. You will then be able to use fdisk for windows or vista will probably setup everything for you....

hope this helps