vista was deleted there is no dual boot i see grub loading when reboot
how can i uninstall ubuntu, i tried doing a boot from cd with recovery disc but get error oxd0000017 what to do now

Did you repartition the drive and setup a dual boot? Does it still give you an option to boot Windows?

Depending on the options you used, Windows was either deleted or it's partition was shrunk and Ubuntu was installed alongside it.

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While running in Ubuntu, open a terminal and enter "sudo fdisk -l". Post the results here.

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it was deleted there is no dual boot i see grub loading when reboot
how can i uninstall ubuntu, i tried doing a boot from cd with recovery disc but get error oxd0000017 what to do now,thanks

You don't need to uninstall Ubuntu. Just install winblows; it will overwrite everything; that's the one (and IMHO only) thing it's good at.

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If Windows doesn't show up in GRUB on startup does it show up as a mountable partition? Can you mount it in Ubuntu? The reason why I ask is that maybe you overwrote everything on the drive, and there's no Windows partition, explaining why Windows doesn't show up in GRUB.

Probably the easiest route would be to install windows over top of it and install Ubuntu within windows (like a program). This gives you the freedom to play around with it without sacrificing Windows until you're ready.

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Of course, if you didn't back up your Vista installation before you let Ubuntu use the whole disk, you've lost everything you had on your Vista system. (Most new computers are delivered without any installation DVDs, and you have to create them yourself if you want to be able to reinstall your system.)

So, if you've lost all your Vista stuff, why not "bite the bullet" and learn to use Ubuntu? Few things for which most people use a "personal computer" really need Windows except some games. For example, reading e-mail, web browsing, reading and writing office documents and spreadsheets, etc., are all easily done using Ubuntu with free, easily downloaded and installed programs.

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rich54, I received your e-mail:Since you have a thread active, I prefer to reply here where the information may be of use to other people as well as you.

First, since a Vista backup set requires four DVDs, I strongly suspect that the "recovery CD" to which you have referred is just a DOS boot disk that is attempting to start your system from a recovery partition on your hard drive. The actual meaning of the error message you report may be available from some Microsoft on-line documentation for which I have not looked.

Second, if my speculation is correct, any recovery partition was erased when Ubuntu reformatted your entire hard drive for use by a Linux system. Once that is done, all a Windows system will "see" is an unformatted disk. (Since Microsoft, in its "infinite wisdom," refuses to support modern file systems, it reports any partition with a "non DOS" type number as an "unformatted partition.")

If the above assumptions are correct, there is no way for you to recover your Vista installation short of having the system manufacturer re-install a new copy of Vista on your hard drive. If that would satisfy you, check with the manufacturer to see if they would accept your hard drive and re-image it for you. (They will, of course, charge you a fee for this service, if they are willing to do it at all.)

Note, however, that what you'll get is a "virgin" system, and any programs you installed or data you had saved will be completely lost if you take that course.

If you have data that was on the drive that you wish to recover (and if the Ubuntu installation did not write over that data) there are data recovery services that might be able to recover some of it for you. For a typical HD, those services typically start around $2,000.00 and increase with the difficulty of the recovery.

If you'd like to try a "do-it-yourself" approach, you could download the System Rescue CD which is a "Live CD" that contains several tools for examining a HD and, when possible, fixing problems. Using the Live CD is fairly straightforward for experienced system administrators, but,of course, if you're not in that group, you will need to carefully study the documentation before you use any of the tools in the Gentoo distribution on that CD.

I too, received e-mail from the OP. I asked him to post on the forum. I believe this should be LQ policy.

i bought another sata hdd and the recovery cd installed the vista operating sytem and it works fine
i should be able to delete/erase the other/ubuntu op system and use the recovery cd without getting a error oxd0000017
anyone knows how to
thanks for the help

The above command will help us trouble shoot your issues dual booting Linux/windows.

If you only want to wipe the hard drive and reload windows, you should consider calling the technical support for your computer manufacturer.

doesn't anyone read my question
i don't have dual boot option or windows vista any longer on my hdd i accidentally erased it when installing ubuntu
how do i erase this hdd with ubuntu on it
i tried the recovery disc but get error oxd0000017
if i remove the hdd with ubuntu and put in a new sata hdd i did reinstall windows vista using the same recovery disc and it works fine
so is there another way of first erasing the hdd with ubuntu before installing the recovery disc?

AFAIK the recovery disk uses a hidden partition on the disk in order to restore the system.
Since you reformatted the entire disk while installing linux, this hidden partition is gone.
So your best bet is to boot and reinstall from a windows install disk.

It is difficult for me to understand most of what you say, please try to use capital letters and punctuation.

If you want to wipe your hard drive, run the Ubuntu live CD. Open the terminal and run 'sudo fdisk -l' and work out which drive you want to wipe. If you cannot work that out, paste the output of that command into this forum.
Replace /dev/sda with the hard drive you have installed windows/ubuntu onto. That will wipe the partition table of your hard drive (which for your purpose is the same as wiping the entire drive.)

Thanks,
SuperJediWombat

The reason for fdisk...

A request was made for you to run the command "fdisk -l" and post the results. This will read the partition table of the HDD as it stands. We cannot otherwise see nor be sure of what Ubuntu did to the existing partitions when it was installed.

Knowledge exceeds supposition every time.