So I installed Ubuntu on my laptop in a dual boot setup. Windows was already present so I let Ubuntu do its thing and ended up with Windows 7 and Ubuntu on my hard drive with the grub boot loader. Easy. No problems there.

Now I wanted to remove Ubuntu, but how do I do that and get the Windows boot loader back? It was way simpler than I thought it would be. I was expecting to do a full blown Windows repair, but no.

First you will need a Windows 7 boot cd. I had a Home Premium CD for my laptop, and my laptop is running Home Premium. I am not sure if you can use any old Windows 7 CD but my first guess would be that it would be fine. If anyone knows for sure, leave me a comment.

Boot to your Windows 7 CD

On the first screen select Next
On screen two select Repair your computer
The third screen should display all of the valid Windows 7 installations that are on the HDD/SSD, select the Use recovery tools… radio button and then select Next.
On the fourth screen select Command Prompt
This brings you to the fifth, and final, screen. On screen five you will enter the commands

bootrec /rebuildbcd
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

Now reboot your workstation and the Windows boot manager is back. To completely remove Ubuntu, you can remove the partitions and extend you windows partition to consume the unused space.

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