For a few years now I have been running Fedora on my entire hard drive, and after a while I decided to reinstall Windows for compatibility with certain programs that won’t run on Linux. There are a few complications, however, when getting Windows to install after it has been completely removed.
Windows cannot read the hard drive if it has been completely erased, and furthermore, if the hard drive has Linux on it, and is formatted as ext3 or ext4, a Windows install CD will not work. During the installation process either the screen will go black or an error will notify that Windows cannot be installed. At least this has been my experience with multiple installation CDs.
The solution is to reformat the hard-drive as fat32, or ntfs, using GParted. A live version of GParted can be found here. Just boot the CD, or live-USB, and use GParted to repartition the entire drive as fat32. Then you should be able to install windows. Afterwards, you can use GParted to shrink the Windows partition down if you want to install Linux on a separate partition. Make sure you install Windows first because it will use the entire hard drive when it installs.
In case something won’t install right, I would also recommend having a Live CD for your favorite Linux distribution . Otherwise, you might be left without an OS.
Summary:
- Back up your files.
- Create a live-CD for the Linux distribution you use if you don’t already have one.
- Install GParted Live CD from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php.
- Use the live-CD to reformat the hard drive as fat32 or ntfs.
- Install windows.
- Resize hard-drive using Gparted.
- Install Linux.
Just a side note, GRUB can boot windows, but the windows boot loader cannot boot Linux. Also when I did this, I reformatted the hard drive as fat32. I didn’t try doing this with ntfs, but I’m fairly sure it will work. The trick is to get windows to recognize the hard drive.
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