To many of us, Linux is a hit and miss kind of deal. There are some of us who hate it with an undying passion and refuse to use it ever again after being stung once. I can understand how and why people would do such a thing, especially when I first started out with Linux, with Ubuntu 7.10, I decided that I immediately hated it, and would never use it again.

The only problem is, to uninstall it, you can’t simply delete the operating system itself as I found out back then, and still forget sometimes even now. This is because your bootloader is often changed from the default Windows Bootloader to either GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) or LILO (LInux LOader) which overwrote your default bootloader. And unlike how some people think, you can’t add Linux to your Windows Bootloader very easily (I’ve heard it done only as rumours). Today, I’m going to show you how to restore your Windows Bootloader.

To restore your bootloader, you need either a copy of the OS you’re trying to boot into, such as a Windows XP disk if you’re restoring XP, Windows 7 DVD if you’re restoring Windows 7, etc. You can also use one of the recovery disks, such as the Windows Vista Recovery Disk or Windows 7 Recovery Disk that have been passed around many times. For XP users though, there’s only Ultimate BootCD For Windows. The use of all them generally are the same more or less, that you boot into the CD, then switch into either the Recovery Console (Windows XP) or use the System Recovery Options Command Prompt (Windows Vista/7). Then comes the nitty gritty: typing the following codes into that command box.

For Windows 7 and Vista, it’s:

bootrec.exe /fixmbr

For Windows XP, it’s

fixmbr

For those that would like an even easier way, there is a program by the name of MBRFix that looks promising, but I haven’t tried it, so I can’t offer any help with it. After fixing your Master Boot Loader so you can boot into Windows only, you can then delete the Linux partition via your Computer Management/Disk Management or via any third party partitioning tool you’d like.