Complete ubuntu removal

I had installed ubuntu 6.06 and then decided to uninstall it and restore vista since I couldn't setup the system to dual boot with vista and ubuntu and ubuntu wiped off vista such that only ubuntu showed up on the startup. Now I wanted to remove ubuntu so using the live cd I removed all the partitions and reset the partitions to NTFS and using the recovery disk installed vista again, but even now during startup it doesn't load vista but instead shows some "grub loader 1.5, error 22!" Please help on getting vista back!!!

 

You probably need to use fixmbr to fix this. Do a search for "fixmbr" in the forums, you'll find there more information than I can give you off the top of my head.

 

By the way, Ubuntu will not remove Vista unless you ask it to remove it.

 

Agreed.

Anyway, to fix your situation, you will need to boot from a Windows installation disk (I'm not sure if your recovery CDs will work for this). Then you'll have to go to the recovery console, and as lemur stated, issue a "fixmbr" command.

 

Get a CD copy of Helix or Knoppix and run it. In a root terminal run

"dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/zero bs=512 count=1" (Without the quotes.)

The /dev/hda will be /dev/sda if you have a SATA harddrive.

 

Ummm, could you explain what this is meant to accomplsh?

The command as written will write the MBR (the first 512 bytes) of the HHD to /dev/zero, which in effect does nothing.

On the other hand, if you swap if= and of=, then you are overwriting your MBR with '\0' character AND the partition table, which may be what you're after, but it still doesn't fix the problem as far as I can see.

If you did
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1
then you would wipe only the MBR, which would then need to be restored somehow.

Care to enlighten me on this one?

 

Good catch, jeff.... when I saw that post I thought "WTF?" but I did not read it closely enough to note the utter nonsense of the command.

 

Using the Vista CD, you should be able to start up the Recovery console; choose your Windows directory (an option for multiple Windows operating systems on the same system) and in the command line type "fixmbr". It will rewrite the master boot record for you. Typing exit will restart the computer.