HOW TO: remove GRUB2 booloader and recover windows default

[deathmood]

Yesterday I installed fedora 16 beta on my laptop (where i have windows 7) and because of some bugs(e.g. i could not install nvidia drivers) i decided to remove it. As far as i understood fedora 16 uses GRUB2 instead of GRUB. First that i did was just to delete fedora partition in the win7 disk manager. But after restarting i've got grub resque console and i could not boot at all!!! i have no windows 7 installation cd to run WindowsRE because win7 was installed by defalt on my laptop when i bought it. So i had to reinstall fedora again to repair GRUB2 and to be able to boot into win7.

GRUB2 was installed into my MBR so how can i repair it without win cd or reinstalling windows7 ???

SO HOW TO REMOVE GRUB2 and fedora 16 without win cd??

it is very simple

(i assume that you can boot into windows through GRUB2)
(if you CAN NOT BOOT into your windows system use Super GRUB2 disk (www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk) to boot into windows)

1 - boot into windows
2 - download and install EasyBCD http://neosmart.net/ (it is free for non-commercial use)
3 - run EasyBCD and go to the section <BCD deployment>
4 - go to <MBR Configuration options> and choose <Install windows Vista/7 bootloader into MBR> (or windows XP bootloader - depends on your windows system version)
5 - press button <Write MBR> and within a second it will be the end of tour suffering!!!!

you can restart computer and there will not be GRUB2 and windows will start by default!!!!

now you can delete fedora (or any other linux partition) using e.g. windows partition manager!!!!

this is my personal expierence and i wrote this little article because i have not sees such articles in the internet while googling!!!

[mrjoeyman]

When you re-install Fedora 16 again, make a /boot partition and remember the designation, ie sda1, sda2 ..whatever and install Grub2 to that /boot partition. After installation you should be able to boot back into windows and use easybcd to detect the Fedora install and set it however you want it, ie make it boot first or second, change the time it waits till one of the entries will boot etc... If you do this please report back your results. This is how I manage my systems, but I have not tried fedora 16 yet, with grub2. Thanks.

Update: You can indeed do what I outlined above. Here is a further explanation about how to do it with Easybcd:

After installation of (whatever distro you choose that has grub2 as the bootloader) is completed, the system will reboot into Windows 7, and that is because Windows is not aware that it now shares the hard drive with another OS. The final task then is to add an entry for linux in Windows’ boot menu. The easiest method of doing that is to use EasyBCD, a proprietary but free application from NeoSmart Technologies. So, download EasyBCD, install and launch it. Click on the Add New Entry tab, then click on the Linux/BSD tab. From the Type dropdown menu, select “GRUB 2″. Click “Add Entry” button, then on the Edit Boot Menu tab. By default, Windows 7 will be booted first, but you may change that to Linux. If you make any changes here, click on Save Settings before exiting EasyBCD.

[clariceoshea]

thanks deathmood...solved my problem with the easybcd

wonder why grub2 remains a source of problems

[LeslieCoffelt]

Thanks so much for this. I already had EasyBCD installed, I just hadn't grasped the "BCD deployment" function was what I needed to safely replace GRUB2 with the default Windows 7 boot loader.

[Demz3]

wonder if Deathmood is/was bee? it used 10 smilies but im sure a lot knows about EasyBCD anyway .