Uninstalling Ubuntu

[Nikolai]

Alexander Duncan wrote:

> I do not understand 
> the reference to "choose the installation that you need to access from 
> the Recovery Console" on page 2 of the instruction on the Recovery 
> Console.


It assumes you *may* have several Windows installations on your machine 
(e.g. WinXP, Win2003 etc). You need to choose which one to access from 
the Recovery Console since this is the purpose of the Recovery Console - 
to access and repair a broken Windows installation. In your case, you 
use it for a slightly different reason - to get to the DOS prompt so 
that you can execute fixmbr command.


> Can anyone explain what is meant when referring to the 
> "installation" - apparently a valid installation number is required 
> according to the Recovery Console prompt, I don't know what this is

No, if I'm not mistaken, Recovery Console doesn't need any serial 
numbers to function.


> and also, what are the criteria of "need to access"? Does one "need to 
> access" XP or Ubuntu itself (I assume that the OS is what is being 
> referred to).

See above. The bottom line is - the reason you want to use Recovery 
Console is to get to the command prompt.


> Alternatively, can anyone provide clear and explicit 
> instructions on how to remove Ubuntu from one's system and recombine its 
> partition with the primary partition on a Windows XP system?

It's all there on the page you found.
To get rid of grub, you execute fixmbr command at DOS command promt. 
Once it's done, all you need to do is to format the disk space where 
Ubuntu is to fat32 file system. This can be done with, according to the 
page you found, GParted LiveCD. I personally never tried that (I have my 
own tools for things like that) but I don't see why it shouldn't work.


> I really think Ubuntu needs to pay as much attention to uninstalling 
> Ubuntu easily and cleanly as to installing it.

Perhaps, but since there's no such thing as uninstalling an OS, the 
procedure is really outside of the OS and hence, the vendor does not 
provide any information on how it should be done. This is common to I 
think all OS vendors.

Nikolai