How do I remove Windows 7 from GRUB in Ubuntu 11.10?

Question

I just installed Ubuntu 11.10 on my Windows 7 Box. It's a single boot. The intention was to install Ubuntu and destroy Windows 7 with a full erasure if you will. However, post install my PC was failing to boot due to Windows 7 being stuck in GRUB and not only being stuck but wanting to be the primary boot partition. There is no known trace left to Windows 7.

I installed Ubuntu a second time, hoping this would resolve the problems. It didn't, but I can boot into Ubuntu manually if I go through the boot selection at BIOS load, and force – in a sense – GRUB manager to load, so I can select from the list.

This is the third time this week I have installed Ubuntu onto 3 separate machines – all originally Windows 7 boxes – and this is the first time I have ran into this issue.

So I know it's possible, but there are more people looking to remove GRUB and go back to Windows rather than the other way around.

Answer 1

You could try:

• boot from a CD
• dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$YOUR_HARD_DRIVE (ie: completely erase the entire drive)
• install again, reformatting the hard drive

although that might take awhile and I'm not sure if it will work.

You could try dd [ditto] count=1 to just wipe out the partition table, which should work much faster if it works.