Removing Linux Grub & Restoring Windows 7 Boot GUI



Removing Linux Grub & Restoring Windows 7 Boot GUI

Recently I had been playing with Kubuntu on my Windows 7 machine. Don’t get me wrong, Kubuntu and other Linux distributions are great. I wanted to remove it because I wasn’t really using it anymore and I was getting sick of booting my machine and forgetting to change the GRUB option at start-up to boot into Windows 7.

I know that the GRUB can be edited so that Windows 7 would boot first but I no-longer had the need for Kubuntu so I wanted to remove it all together including the GRUB.

First of all I made a really dumb n00b error of booting into Windows 7 and deleting the partitions that Kubuntu occupied. Of course, the GRUB remained and my computer wouldn’t even start. To get back to being able to boot again, I inserted my Kubuntu DVD and re-installed so the GRUB would work again.

Now I thought, maybe EasyBCD would be able to remove the GRUB from within Windows 7 and then I could delete the Kubuntu partitions again. Unfortunately EasyBCD could not do this.

My next plan was to boot from my Windows 7 DVD and use the option to fix start-up errors. This was not a good plan either. The GRUB remained but I now had a Windows Vista GUI start-up instead of the much more pretty Windows 7 one.

I decided to do some research before making anymore stupid mistakes – RTFM comes to mind.

So I discovered that the first step to remove the GRUB (and Kubuntu or other disto of Linux) is to boot from your Windows 7 DVD, select your language and then to choose the repair option.

At the repair option you should choose the command prompt and use the command:bootsect /nt60 C:

Now restart your computer and Windows 7 should boot without entering the GRUB because this has been removed from your machine.

If you have somehow got the old Windows Vista start-up GUI displaying on start-up, then you should wait for your computer to boot into Windows 7 and run the command prompt as an Administrator. To get the Windows 7 GUI start-up back, use the following command:bootrec /fixmbr

Once you’re happy that your computer is booting without the GRUB and directly into Windows 7 you can remove all traces of the Linux distribution going into Disk Management (Windows Key + R and type diskmgmt.msc). Simply delete the partitions and then expand the rest of the drive containing data to fill the empty space.

The above is just a brief overview of what I did but if you have any questions or would like anything in more detail, please contact me or leave a comment.

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