First Linux Home Install and an (Unexpected) Uninstall

Around the start of the year, I installed Linux on my home PC. It was okay, as it was an old Fedora distro. I had no problems as it worked fine and I really wanted to play around with it a bit. The real problem was that it was installed on top of WinXP and installed on a third hard disk: a 4GB hard disk which was more than five years old, maybe closer to ten years old. Another thing going against the experiment was that I still didn’t have internet access at the time I installed it. I would have wanted to some comparison between XP and Linux as the OS performed on the net. That would have been fun to see.

But after this and that, and the hard disk being beyond the expected lifetime, it was beginning to show its age. At first the disk sounded like an old IBM 360KB floppy disk during boot up of an IBM XT compatible (circa 1983), going a wheezy/nasal “ka-zzhinng-eh ka-zzhing-ah hheengg heengg heeng”, or worse, sounding like a 10MB hard disk from thirty years ago (like a chicken with sore throat clucking “tock-tock-tock ka-shheeeghuee ka-shheeeghue”). But this only happened about once every hour or two after booting up to Windows.

For about two weeks, I was thinking of deleting the third hard disk and reverting back to a WinXP boot up.  I procrastinated, then got very busy.  But the PC was still running fine, except for the intermittent sounds from the third hard disk.  And then it happened, and on a weekend yet, the hard disk with the Linux OS died a natural death.  Old age, wear and tear finally caught up with the 4GB disk.

Which left me with a PC which could not boot up. Good thing I had already planned to uninstall Linux. Simple enough to find the XP install disk, and then going to the recovery console and running FIXMBR. Well and good.  With FIXMBR done on the console and able to reboot I was able to have the PC up and running WinXP.

Next hurdle was the second hard disk. It was tagged by Windows as unformatted. I was about to give several friends a call before I remembered started searching on the internet for a possible solution. A simple search for a utility to “unformat” a partition, a little effort at understanding the command-line text-based interface, with almost literate computerspeak/technicalese and a reboot, and the hard disk was recovered without a problem.

I found out how easy it was to uninstall Linux on the PC, through the hard way, of course. Just needed some patience. A lot less patience than if you were uninstalling Windows. By the way, though installing Linux does need more technical knowledge, it’s a lot less of a chore than the automated install process for Windows.

That was last June.  Since then, I’ve had some other recovery tools handy, a data backup software and a recovery CD.  I’ve also gotten a second PC which is now a dedicated Ubuntu Linux machine.  And I doubt if I would be doing any uninstalling anytime soon.