Removing Linux - Hassle Free
April 14th, 2014
Anyone who's running dual boot Windows and Linux off of the same hard drive knows that Linux's GRUB loader takes priority over windows boot loader when booting up your PC. Is this a problem? Well, not necessarily.....unless you plan on removing Linux from your system.
Sections:
Problem
If you have Windows and wanted to remove Linux from your PC, without installing another OS, what's the first thing you would do? Format the Linux partition? Sounds like the natural option, right? If you did, you would get the following error:
GRUB LOADER NOT FOUND
...or something similar. The result: you can't boot into Windows, even though it's in perfect working condition.
WHY?
Because GRUB loader was located on the root Linux partition, the same partition that you just formatted! And since you were dependent on GRUB loader to boot into Windows, the computer does not know that you have a bootable partition on your hard drive.
GRUB LOADER NOT FOUND
...or something similar. The result: you can't boot into Windows, even though it's in perfect working condition.
WHY?
Because GRUB loader was located on the root Linux partition, the same partition that you just formatted! And since you were dependent on GRUB loader to boot into Windows, the computer does not know that you have a bootable partition on your hard drive.
Solution: Easy BCD
DOWNLOAD EASY BCD HERE
Easy BCD is a simple tool that lets you edit your boot loader. So, using Easy BCD, our approach to solving this issue is very simple:
Delete the existing boot loader, and create a new one, configure Windows as the default OS, AND THEN formatting your Linux partition.
Easy BCD is a simple tool that lets you edit your boot loader. So, using Easy BCD, our approach to solving this issue is very simple:
Delete the existing boot loader, and create a new one, configure Windows as the default OS, AND THEN formatting your Linux partition.
Once installed, fire up Easy BCD and follow these steps:
- Click on BCD Backup/Repair from the EasyBCD Toolbox on the left hand side.
- Under BCD Management Options, make sure "Reset BCD Configuration" is selected, and hit Perform Action.
- You'll get a BCD Report saying it's been successfully reset. YOU MUST ADD AT LEAST ONE ENTRY OR ELSE YOUR PC WILL NOT BOOT! We're going to do just that, so click OK and move along.
- Click on View Settings or Edit Boot Menu to confirm that your boot menu has 0 entries.
- Click on Add New Entry from the EasyBCD Toolbox to get started.
- First configure your Windows boot entry (according to your computer) and click Add Entry.
- Moving on to Linux, change the Type to GRUB2 (instead of Legacy GRUB). This will let the computer automatically detect your GRUB loader, instead of you having to manually specify where you installed it. Just change the name and click Add Entry.
- Click on Edit Boot Menu and make sure that Windows is the Default entry.
- SAVE!!
- Close and reopen EasyBCD to make sure that your boot list entries were properly written. They should have been, but if they weren't, just repeat the steps.
Go ahead and reboot your system. If you select your Linux entry, your computer should start up your GRUB loader, allowing you to access Linux (if you want to do that for some reason). Anyways, now that we've made sure that GRUB loader isn't the default boot menu on our PC, we can go ahead format the Linux partition and do whatever we want with that space. You won't be able see this partition in explorer, so unless you install a partitioning software, you'll have to delete the partition using Windows Disk Management.
Note: Just be sure to remove the linux entry from the boot menu after you've formatted the partition.
Note: Just be sure to remove the linux entry from the boot menu after you've formatted the partition.
Personal Experience
Many years ago, I was using Ubuntu 6.0. For those who don't know, they didn't have Live CDs back then, so even though I rarely used it, I still had to install it. I finally felt it was just uselessly taking up space, and decided to remove it from my computer. Unfortunately, I went straight ahead and formatted it. At the time, I didn't know about EasyBCD, and there weren't any LiveCD versions for any distributions of Linux (at least not to my knowledge). I ended up formatting my Windows partition. I didn't lose any data (since I don't store personal data on the same partition as any OS), but I still had to reinstall all my software, which, as anyone knows, is quite a pain.
I learned about EasyBCD about a year back, but didn't really use it for this particular reason. After all, this isn't it's intended purpose. It was created to have a single boot menu for all of you're OSs, and to be able to boot into legacy OSs, like Windows 98, which even Microsoft no longer supports. When I was pondering the topic of editing boot records, it suddenly hit me one day that EasyBCD would be perfect for this! I recently removed Snow Linux from my computer and replaced it with Ubuntu Studio. I could've directly overwritten Snow Linux, but I thought, "Hey, why not make an article out of it?" And that's it! I hope I'll be out with another article soon! Until then, tata!
I learned about EasyBCD about a year back, but didn't really use it for this particular reason. After all, this isn't it's intended purpose. It was created to have a single boot menu for all of you're OSs, and to be able to boot into legacy OSs, like Windows 98, which even Microsoft no longer supports. When I was pondering the topic of editing boot records, it suddenly hit me one day that EasyBCD would be perfect for this! I recently removed Snow Linux from my computer and replaced it with Ubuntu Studio. I could've directly overwritten Snow Linux, but I thought, "Hey, why not make an article out of it?" And that's it! I hope I'll be out with another article soon! Until then, tata!