uninstall ubuntu

[mappila]

Dear all,
I am new to this forum and ubuntu.
I was using windows xp sp3. Then last week I installed ubuntu 10.04 in my system as there was some problem with windows xp. 2 -3 days I played with ubuntu, but I could not solve sevaral things as I was a beginner to this OS.Then I installed windows xp sp3 again and started working. But I have found that now ubuntu is not coming at all even in the starting of the computer and I have found that one of my partion is lost(disappeared). Previously there were C(60 GB), F(15 GB), I(60 GB) and J(15 GB) partition with my data distributions in all. But after this reinstall of xp, the ubuntu is not at all coming at the time of starting of computer and it starts with xp. Also, the space for partition I is reduced to 37 GB and partition J is disappeared totally. My sevaraldata are in I drive and please help to reget my hard disk space.
Along with this, I want to install ubuntu parallel with xp.


I am a beginner to this ubuntu and forums. Please help me

 

[wmorri]

Hi,

Welcome to CF!!

Welcome to the world of linux. I am sure that we can help you with this problems as I have personally seen this in the past. When you start your computer do you still get the GRUB boot screen or does it go straight to windows? If you are getting the GRUB screen are you getting any error messages. Another thing is that I am going to have you working a lot with your Ubuntu livecd. As such driver letters aren't going to be much help to us.

When you get a chance if you would boot into your Ubuntu Livecd and then post the output for the following command in terminal.

fdisk -l [color=blue]l is a lower case L[/color]

The command above will show us what the partitions are on your hard drive. This will hopefully give you and I a better sense of what space you have and where things are.

Cheers!

 

[Bucky24]

If you reinstalled XP, then it overwrote your GRUB boot partition. That would be why your Ubuntu doesn't come up anymore.
If the partition disappeared after you installed Ubuntu, then it's probably because XP doesn't know how to read the ext filesystem that is on that partition, so it assumes that part of the disk is just garbage data and ignores it. Your hard drive space is still there, just unreadable by windows.

I try to keep my data on a FAT32 or NTFS partition, since both windows and linux can read them.


You can follow directions here to reinstall GRUB (this will wipe out your windows XP boot sector, but GRUB should detect windows and add it to the list of operating systems it shows when your computer starts up):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

-Bucky24