On 22/04/10 11:30, Alan Pope wrote: > Hi Keith, > > On 22 April 2010 11:21, Keith<ke...@grumpyface.me.uk> wrote: >> Perhaps someone could help me my explaining how I can recover the Ubuntu >> partition for Windows to use. >>
<snip> > If you installed Ubuntu in a separate partition, boot from the live > CD. Run gparted. Highlight the ubuntu partition(s) (there will likely > be two, one root, one swap), delete them. Highlight the windows > partition and resize it up to take the space. Click apply, leave it > running. Job done. Only issue I can see is Grub, you may find doing this you might have to boot off a Windows XP CD, choose the Recovery Console option and run fixmbr (or it might be fixboot, I get them mixed up). It will then over-write Grub and you should be able to boot in to Windows by default. > Note there is some risk to this, so having a backup is a good thing. > I agree, depending how you want to take a backup, I'd suggest either backing up the documents from XP (this can be done by booting into Ubuntu and copying the Documents and Settings folder and everything in it to something like a USB stick, it won't let you do it in Windows as some files will be locked). That will copy all the existing profile settings such as Firefox, IE etc settings over. Or you could use CloneZilla and do a complete clone of the drive (CloneZilla is about a 150MB ISO). Doing a complete drive clone will copy everything (Ubuntu, XP etc) which can be restored if anything goes wrong. Last resort, if you have a specific manufacturers Windows CD* (if it's a branded machine) or restore disk handy then you could use that to restore or reinstall Windows. * I say specific manufacturers Windows CD as the big manufacturers (Dell, IBM, Acer, HP, Sony etc) have signatures in the BIOS which allows Windows to activate. They use a common CD key specific to the make of the machine and version of Windows. It's more common that manufacturers supply restore discs which restore the OS, drivers and all the junkware they bundle in. Dell for one usually provide a Windows installation CD specific to Dell machines but it will install a clean copy of Windows (no junkware or drivers). Generally the license key stuck to the bottom of the machine won't work (although you might be able to get away with phoning Microsoft to get it to activate). Rob -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
