Get your Windows back!!

I had a dual boot machine with Windows and Ubuntu installed on different partitions, but my 80GB hard-disk was just about full and I needed some more space. But I wasn’t ready to plug in my 160GB HDD for that, nah better keep it as a USB drive. So the only option for me was to say goodbye to Ubuntu for a while & recover about 10GB of disk space from it.

But there was another problem. There’s not a simple way of un-installing an operating system as you can do with a software installed on an operating system. The only way to do it was to login to windows & delete the partition having Ubuntu. But then the problem was that GRUB bootloader would also have been deleted & I wouldn’t have been able to boot into windows as Ubuntu re-wrote the MBR(Master Boot Record) when it was installed.

I searched the internet for a solution, & I got many solutions as well, but they were different in approaches. Some sounded absurd straightaway even to me since I’m not so proficient in these matters. Some even suggested re-installing windows! Finally I came across a solution on Microsoft’s website, but then that required me to have FDISK utility, b’coz then I’d just have to boot via the disk having that & then after logging in to windows, open the command prompt & issue the undocumented command:

But alas, I didn’t have that utility. I searched the internet again, didn’t find a download of the Microsoft version but found another version here. And I wasn’t sure if this would work, since it might damage my windows installation than doing any good!!

But it was my good day nevertheless, I came across another solution that required WindowsXP installation CD. So I decided to take on the risk(it was risk as I was doing it first time & if it went wrong then that would’ve meant 1 full day gone in installing windows & all my software and configuring them again). First I deleted the Ubuntu partition from the Windows Disk-Manager & then restarted the machine. After inserting the WinXP CD, I booted from it & at the first screen, when given the choice, chose recovery console. It asked me to log into windows using administrator which I did & then when I got the prompt, I entered the following command:

Just this command, nothing else. It then asked me whether I want to proceed & that my partition tables might get damaged. I chose to proceed & it fixed(rewrote) the MBR. Then I exited the recovery console which rebooted the PC. This time I chose to boot from HDD as normal and voila, my windows bootloader came up!!

What I was thinking would be quite tricky proved to be just a piece of cake that tasted quite good!! So this is for all those who want to remove linux from their machines but are wondering how to get windows back after that!! :tup: