so i have a 500gb hdd in my laptop. i was curious about ubuntu so i installed it along side windows 7. only lasted about a day before i just wanted to wipe the whole thing and reinstall 7. since ive done that. my hard drive is only showing 280gb in windows 7. guessing the rest was a partition to ubuntu? but i figured that since i wiped the drive that it should have freed the space up. i didn't actually go through an uninstall for ubuntu, i just figured i could put windows back over it. how do i free up the old ubuntu partition or whatever? i went into repair but when i try to delete the partition it wont let me, i can click "new" on it, then after i can click "format" "delete" but once i do those it will say "extended" beside the partition. can't figure out how to exactly completely remove it so i have all my 500gb for 7 again. sorry if this didn't make sense, been working all day...exhausted.

Try this :

1) Boot your laptop from live Ubuntu (USB).
2) Connnect the HDD to it.
3) Format the disk completely using fdisk - remove all the partitons.
4) Use partprobe on that disk so that the partiton table gets written on it.
6) Do not create any partitons or filesystem on it - leave it as a blank raw disk.
5) Then install windows on it. Now you should see all the 500 gigs.

On a side note - Did you use the windows volume manager and try to see if you could see the remaining 212 gig space there apart from the 288 gig windows partition???

not sure what live ubuntu is. i did burn ubuntu to a disk. can i use that to repair it some how>

also under disk management there is 199 gb of "free space" but when i try to delete that partition it says "there is not enough space on disc available" so i can see the actual space that was used for ubuntu but im still unsure as to removing it....

Fine, so as long as you are able to see that space from the Windows Volume manager you need not worry about reformatting the disk. Some details here - the "unused" space means that that part of the disk is not formatted with any type of a filesystem and is a "raw" disk as such. You have 2 options:

1) "Expand" the current partition - right click on the 288G partition and you should see an option to expand it. So expand and make it to use the 199G space as well.
2) "Format" the "unused" space and make a new partition out of it - right click on the 199G unused space and you should see an option to format it. Use the defaults and it will format (as a FAT32 filesystem) and you can then access that partition from your "My Computer" .

happy to say that i fixed the issue with a program called EASEUS partition master. turned free space into a partition then merged the 2. yay