Linux's dirty little secret: Uninstall

Sorry, Charlie!

If you are qualified to install an OS, then you should realize that "uninstalling" an operating system will essentially lobotomize your computer; it doesn't matter WHAT OS you remove, you're going to have problems.

And that "uninstall Windows" crap you mention? The "Windows XP Help and Support Center" is about as useful as tits on a boar. As a Windows professional, if I have a question about how to do something on Windows, I'm going to go to http://www.google.com/microsoft and not to any Microsoft obfustication page.

Your complaint is unfounded garbage; it's pure FUD, designed to frighten people away from *trying* Linux. If you don't know how to "uninstall" something, you have no business installing it yourself in the first place if there's even a small chance you'll want to remove it.

And the way to remove Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, BeOS, ReactOS, or any other OS on a PC is simple: Boot a DOS floppy with the "zap.exe" utility from IBM on it. Run the command "zap 0" and answer "y" to the prompts. Then go install a new OS on your freshly-blank hard drive.

It's no secret, dirty or otherwise

The only reason that I can see anyone having a problem with this is because it is so simple that some people can't believe how simple it is.

To completely remove Linux, just install Windows.

If you have a dual boot system and you don't want to overwrite your existing Windows installation, use your Windows rescue disk (you do have a Windows rescue disk don't you).

Unlike Linux, most versions of Windows do not offer the opportunity to gracefully install alongside another OS, they just blindly install on the entire drive overwriting everything.

To completely replace one Linux installation with another, just install the new version on the partition where the old one was. You can even do this on a Linux/Windows dual boot system without overwriting the Windows partition - just make sure that you get the correct partition.

There is a lot of information about this - just Google.

Probably the main reason that Google comes up with so many more hits for installing Linux than removing it is because there is so much more interest in installing Linux than in removing it. The other reason being that it is trivially easy.

This is retarded

Um, there's nothing to freak out about here. If you are capable of thinking it through, just boot into windows, use a free tool such as EasyBCD and just simple reinstall the standard windows boot manager with it (which will overwrite grub). If you've already screwed it up, load up your windows disk and run a couple commands to repair/reinstall the boot manager. You won't lost any data, despite the claims of this article. Next, go the disk management tool by right clicking on my computer, and then just remove the linux partitions. Simple.

If you don't do your hw before trying something, you always run the risk of screwing something up.

Also, to the people who couldn't get xvid/wmv/etc to work under linux, did you even bother to search through the package manager software? And if that didn't work, did you try turning on restricted repositories? Did you try google? That stuff is generally common knowledge and very easy to setup and get working, it requires about the same amount of effort as it takes in windows (find the codecs, install). If you can do a google search for and install Klite in windows, you could do the equivalent in linux -.-

I just had this experience.

I just had this experience. As I was considering a Windows 7 upgrade, I thought, hey, why not see what Linux is like these days? The Ubuntu site claimed you could simply install alonside windows, and easily uninstall afterwards, so I went ahead and made a disk, and installed (9.10 Karmic Koala). Well, it runs about as fast as XP on my laptop, boots a little faster, dealt with my network no problem, but doesn't have any support (that I could find) for Divx, Xvid, etc. and getting wmv. files to play was difficult. Yes I tried VLC - I'm not a computer tech, and I don't want to become one, I'm not writing out lines of "config this" or that to install something.

So, I want to uninstall - hah. No chance. The only way to do it is a complicated process through windows, which appears to risk my windows data at the same time. My solution - reinstall Ubuntu with the smallest possible partition (3GB) so at least it isn't wasting too much space while I ignore it.

Why uninstall any operating system?

It's kind of the heart of the system. No OS, nothing works sort of thing.

Replacing any OS, whether Windows or Linux or Desktop UNIX or etc, etc, is probably easiest with a complete data backup, then FORMAT.

Start clean, not with the trash any OS leaves behind.

By the way, I do understand people returning to Windows. Had to do it myself several times. Linux just doesn't cut it in the application space. Tried Wine and all the other emulators and they just have problems. Besides, why does Linux want to be Windows?

Just format, start completely over. You've got to replace all the software anyway, so put your data somewhere else for a short time.

Go to Google and search

Go to Google and search "install Linux" and you get about 1,450,000 hits. Try "uninstall Linux" and you get about 16,800. "Remove Linux" gets you about 53,300.
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So, you want to "uninstall Linux"?

sudo rm -rf /

Use virtualization

If you just want to "try Linux out while keeping Windows," repartitioning your hard drive and double-booting is really last (20th) century. You can get free virtualization software, such as VirtualBox, install any flavor of Linux in it, and enjoy. When you get tired of it, just delete the virtual machine, and it is gone without a trace.