Attempting to uninstall Linux
 

Short story: I received a netbook for schooling. I wanted to partition the drive to run Win7 RC and Ubuntu Remix because I wanted to relearn basic Linux. Basically, a "few" drinks later I installed Ubuntu Remix and I didn't partition my drive and thus totally wiped Win7 away.

My comp:
Eee PC 1005HA
Intel Atom[N280(1.66GHz])CPU
2GB RAM
160GB HDD

I have attempted the past two days to create a boot disk with my USB pen drive (because I am currently unable to get a hold of an external DVD drive). The furthest I can get in the installation process takes me to either
or

depending on whatever variation of OS and etc I use.


I have formatted my USB pen drive to be bootable and have attempted this process with several other Windows OSs. I have not attempted this with another type of Linux-based OS. I have changed the boot priority in BIOS to take priority to the removable drive, and I have even disabled the HDD through this process. My netbook does not have wireless nor a wired connection to the internet (some driver problems).

Any help would be appreciated. I have spent way too many hours working on this and do not know enough Linux (nor have found anything) to solve this problem on my own.

Thank you


..::Yosef11of12

So what do you want to do? Install linux while leaving enough room for a dual boot windows installation later on?

LOL, thank you for pointing out that I did not ask a question.

At this point, I have Ubuntu as my OS. I'd love to just reinstall Win7 and then partition enough room to place Ubuntu back on. Alas I cannot get past the two messages I have quoted above, which I receive on bootup.


..::Yosef11of12

If that Netbook has no built in DVD/CD-ROM drive, then I suggest to buy a USB external drive fairly cheap, and you will need the Windows 7 disk as well. There is good partition tool here; http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ , which is a live bootable type that you can burn an image of the iso file. And one called the System Rescue disk here; http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page , There is a chance that your Ubuntu install shrank down the windows 7 partition and it may still be there. So if it is, you can add in to the /boot/grub/menu.lst file lines to boot win 7, which are; root and makeactive and then chainloader +1. The root will be; root (hd0,0) if the win 7 was and is on the first hard drive, first partition, so if it is on the 2nd partition then it's like this; root (hd0,1) because the grub boot loader counts from 0 zero.

Also there is a boot order menu F key to press on most computers to select the boot device which includes a bootable USB flash drive. Such as for a Dell it is the F12 key, and my Gateway is F10.

Ty james2b for your response, but it has not helped me one bit. I have been this entire time trying to boot up through a USB drive. If Win7 has shrunk (which I don't find it to be the case), I would not be able to do any of the Linux commands specified. The whole point of my installing a Linux platform was to learn it. I don't know it yet and don't have the time anytime soon to truly dive into it this week.

As for the f10 suggestion, I have done that same thing by accessing the BIOS and changing the boot priority. There is no other way to get a boot menu (that I've found or researched) with this computer.

But still, thank you.

..::Yosef11of12

How are you making the boot usb? Have you tried unetbootin? http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Also, can you post your existing partition scheme. And try to give some sort of qualitative description of each partition.

When windows boots from USB, it loses it's root filesystem because it refreshes USB ports, so booting windows or the windows installer from USB is impossible as far as I know. I think you should just install fedora, Ubuntu Netbook Remix is good for nothing. Fedora provides a full linux desktop and a non-mutilated core, unlike debian/ubuntu. You can download Fedora 11 here. Just use unetbootin to write it to a pen drive. This is a direct link to the file itself. Hope I helped, Ben.

Opinions!

Maybe you'd like to expand on that statement? An article perhaps?


We want to give SOLUTIONS to the problem. Not WORKAROUNDS. I'm still unclear on your current status. Does your windows installation work? Does your Linux installation work? You should be able to resize your partitions without losing any data.

If you want to completely wipe your system and start from scratch, install Windows 7 first. If you use the Microsoft partitioner, leave about 128 MiB at the begining of the drive as unpartitioned space, then set up your windows partition, then leave the remainder of your drive for your linux partition.

When you install linux, format the first partition as ext3 and mount it to /boot, and format the remainder of the drive as ext4 and mount it to /.

Because this is a netbook, you might be interested in full disk encryption - let us know if you need help with that.