Removing Linux

Earlier today i cleaned up another drive which had Linux in it with ext2, native Linux format. I was planning to install another Linux distribution. But careful guys making a small mistake here might erase the whole drive. Make sure you have backup for all the important files. And a fair knowledge on Grub or Lilo editor for later retrieving Windows is important. Also select a good distribution that has and supports all the packages. There were few mistakes that i made, and they are..

1. There is only way to remove Linux from system, format the partition which had Linux, no other option.

2. After successfully formatting a partition, that is what i thought, but what i did was i had just changed the boot table to list the older partition of Linux on windows. But remember if your drive shows up in windows, you won't be able to format it, because it is and was under ext2 format in Linux, which windows knows nothing about.

3. My Swap space in Linux was 3 GB, in windows you will be able to use the swap space in Fat32 format, but not NTFS. If you want to use the rest of the space under ext2, then you have to go for type conversion from ext2 to fat32 or NTFS, for which several file system conversion tools are available.

Finally the entire problem was solved by using partition magic, and i erased the whole linux partition, made a type a conversion from ext2 to Fat32 and from Fat32 to NTFS. Remember always a fair amount of experience and knowledge is required to do this, so Google and learn it first before trying to uninstall Linux.