Black On Stuff

So I have decided to uninstall Ubuntu. I had it on a big partition of 50GB and another one with 2 GB for swap. I had only a few problems with this system, but the main reason to get rid of it was because switching between two systems was quite annoying. I mean you either have it all in one place or not.

I have found that accessing NTFS partitions was quite easy, even in write mode.

I have found that accessing ext2 partitions from my XP was easy too. For this I was using Ext2 IFS for Windows, a driver that maps the linux partitions into XP drives. I was disappointed to see that I could tamper Ubuntu from XP, read and write configuration files etc. Not too safe.

The interface on Ubuntu was quite nice but I messed up something related to transparency and windows effects so the interface was running quite in slow-motion. Too many settings related to these kind of enhancements so I wasn’t able to setup the default settings.

The system update procedure was very easy, even tough there were a lot of packages to update each time.

I tried to install my TV card to watch some DVB TV on my Ubuntu, but this was quite impossible. The lack of drivers for this is something one should think before trying to use another system.

So here is how I have uninstalled Ubuntu: delete all two partitions and reformat them with an XP compatible file system (FAT32 or NTFS). To restore the masterboot record, most of web articles were pointing me to use Windows Recovery Console available only from XP install CD and an utility tool called fixmbr. But since I could not find my XP cd I had to look for another tool. The best one I found was MBRWizard who does more than just fixing the MBR but that was enough for me.

The command line for this was “MBRWiz.exe /Repair=1″. Simple, huh?

So remember: if you’re not ready to fully go using just one OS, you will not be able to use two at the same time.