I have an Acer laptop running Zorin and am trying to reinstall my windows 7 recovery disks as I am going to sell it. I have tried and get error msg. How does one uninstall a Linux distro in order to get back to Windows. I love Zorin but I dont think I will have an easy time selling it with a Linux distro. Thanks.

Hi there,

Never, ever tell others what error messages you get, it might help them give a good advice. ;-)

Have you tried to delete the partition you booted from? That's not possible, you can't roll up the carpet you stand on.
Boot your machine from an external media, a live CD or live USB version, then run gparted or fdisk, and delete all partitions on sda (or whatever the internal HDD may be in that case).

Or take out the HDD temporarily, attach it to a different PC using a USB adapter, and delete the partitions then.

[X] Doc CPU

+1

I disagree. It is possible and it is easy to do it. Just do it this way:



1. Boot the system and log in as root.
2. If you are not already on a CLI start a terminal.
3. Launch this command:This will delete the MBR, which means that you loose the MBR-part of the bootloader and the partition table.
If you now reboot you should be able to install Windows, it will think it has a brand new harddisk to install on.

I used the command and I am now running Windows 7. After using Zorin for so long, I am finding Win7 a drag...not as fast or fun. Will reinstall Zorin in the future. Really good distro. Thanks for the excellent advice. You are so smart here...we newbies need you!

Hi there,

yes, I agree. I know a few Linux distros - Zorin is not among them, but Windows 7 is a pain in the ass.
I witnessed the evolution of Windows from Windows 3.0 in 1991 (IIRC) until today, and in my eyes, Windows 2000 and XP marked the peak of quality and usability. Since then, it's been decaying into a mess of colors and visual effects, and it's laden with hundreds of gadgets whose only purpose is to force even the most powerful PC down on its knees. And many of these features can't even be disabled.

The most recent version of Windows I'm still using is XP/SP2. Vista was apparently a disaster, and I'm glad I never even had to use it; Windows 7 appears to me as a minor improvement (which wasn't hard from there), but with Windows 7, Microsoft finally managed to migrate me away from Windows (except for two XP machines that have been running fine for years).

[X] Doc CPU

Zorin is a really good distro to use for transitioning from Mr. Softies os. It closely resembles windows but runs faster. windows causes my pc to lock and falter sometimes but zorin never does. zorin also loads tons faster as mr softies is slow and is annoying as it constantly wants to install updates which I block. I am loading zorin on my other pc today as even the graphics is quicker. Thanks for all the help and I will continue monitoring this site for more tips.

Blocking updates is a bad idea on any OS, regardless if it is Windows, Linux, BSD or MacOS X.

Hi there,

blocking updates is a very good idea if the OS is Windows. There are two reasons for that.

1. MS constantly introduces new "features" I don't want at all. So if I'm a good boy and run all updates when they're available, I soon end up having lots of bloat that hampers me working with the system, and my once lean and clean and stable Windows installation is a mess.
2. In Windows, there is no easy way I can take an inventory on the installed libraries and components, let alone the version of each one. But since many of them, while not even being backwards compatible, are heavily intertwined with each other, and also with one or the other application, you quickly run into incompatibility issues - and then it takes hours, if not days to find the culprit.

Common Linux distros, on the other side, have their package manager keeping track of everything you install or update. Plus, I haven't yet had a situation where a more recent version of a package wasn't backwards compatible - except when the major version changes. That's when you should look at it very critically.

Believe me, I have seen many Windows PCs that were updated to death ... :-(

[X] Doc CPU

AFAIK, new features are only introduced with Service Packs, otherwise the updates are optional. I had for example the choice to install DirectX 11 on my Vista install and I denied it, since i didn't have DirectX 11 capable hardware at that time. No problem at all.

I remeber that to be true with Win9X, maybe even sometimes with XP. Never had that issue with Vista and I doubt that it will be different with 7.

May be I should have said that better: Blocking all updates is a bad idea, otherwise you shouldn't cry if the security holes that were known and already patched are used to compromise your system.

Hi there,

you forget the "hidden features", which sometimes even means that a particular feature is removed, though I don't have a ready example right now. I do remember, however, that several times I was glad I had not installed that update.

Then you're lucky. The company I work for as a freelancer is using Windows 7 and MS Office 2010 on all office PCs. And every other week, the IT guys have to retroactively roll back some Windows or Office update because combinations of them render the PCs unstable.
Apart from that, yes, I was referring to XP in the first place, because as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I avoid later Windowses whenever I can.

Then I agree. Yet, with my Windows PCs I have a strict procedure: Once installed, never modified. Every update is a potential stability or incompatibility issue.

(a) When there's a so-called security update, I consider: Is the problem that is addressed by this update/hotfix/patch relevant for my particular system configuration? If it is, which is very rare, I might install the update, strictly following procedure (b) below.
(b) Before installing, removing or updating a piece of software, or making major changes to the configuration, I make a full backup of the system. Then the installation/update is done, and then this PC is under very critical surveillance for a few days. Only when there are no new issues with this machine, I keep this modification. If there are, I restore the previous state from the backup.

I've never had a reason to cry about security issues in all the time I've been using Windows. Stability, yes, now and then.

[X] Doc CPU

I have had to make the decision to install only the updates from windows I can recognize as needed by my system as, in the past with this laptop, I have installed all updates only to have my laptop so screwed up by them that I couldnt even get my wireless to work. I pick and choose those to install and the rest are junk from mr softie. Never had this problem using Zorin as the updates seem to enhance the system and never have caused a problem with the usability of my machine. Installing updates with windows is a crap shoot, heavy on the crap.

I am trying to get my laptop back to windows 7 to sell it. need to remove zorin. have tried command line given here but it says permission denied. what am I doing wrong. second time I have tried it and first time it worked great. now, it won`t work at all. help.

I would guess you missed this part from the suggestion above:

If it Ubuntu based, prefix the command with sudo if you are referring to the dd command above. It doesn't actually remove Zorin or any OS as explained above, just deletes the master boot record.

got it...thanks