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I have a desktop with a second hard drive that I rarely use and am interested in playing around with Linux. I was thinking I might try dual booting Ubuntu from this second drive but I am curious to know if I can completely erase the OS and everything with it and just use it as a secondary hard drive again for my original OS (which is Windows 7).

I know almost nothing about Linux and this may be a dumb question but I am just interested in testing Ubuntu out and I might want my drive back some day.

Number7tSeven
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  • Before asking questions, you should look around on askubuntu to see whether this question, or a closely related question has already been asked. Yes, you can remove Ubuntu after installation. If you just want to try Ubuntu and not sure if you want to continue using it, I advise you to not dualboot but instead install it in a virtual machine. It is a lot less hassle with bootloaders. In case you would want to play 3D games with Ubuntu, ignore my comment and dualboot. – Jakke Jun 26 '14 at 03:33
  • @EliahKagan it is kind of the same question. – Jakke Jun 26 '14 at 03:51
  • @EliahKagan another one is this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/487908/how-to-safely-uninstall-ubuntu-help-needed – Jakke Jun 26 '14 at 03:57
  • @Number7tSeven Is that helping? It's about how to make a computer with Ubuntu have Windows instead, which I don't think is what you're asking. You can tell Ubuntu's installer to put GRUB only on the external drive. Select the external hard drive in the BIOS boot menu, when you want to use Ubuntu. Later you can offload any files from the external that you want to keep, wipe the external hard drive, and give it a partition with whatever filesystem (e.g., NTFS) you want. If this is reopened I'll try to post an answer explaining that further. – Eliah Kagan Jul 02 '14 at 01:48
  • @Jakke Just installing Ubuntu to the external drive with default configuration will likely make it so the Windows system installed on the internal drive will not boot, whenever the external drive is not attached (because the part of GRUB in the MBR is not enough to provide a working boot menu--it bootstraps to the part of GRUB in the Ubuntu system to provide this functionality). The OP here--as well as others who find this question through searching--probably wants to be able to detach the external drive and use their computer, even before uninstalling Ubuntu. – Eliah Kagan Jul 02 '14 at 01:54

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