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I am trying to install Windows 7 on an old system, which had Ubuntu 12.10 on it. I accessed the drive with a cradle and deleted the partitions off of it, then formatted it to NTFS (For Windows). Popped it back in the system and tried to boot from CD to install Windows 7 and I get:

error: unknown filesystem
grub rescue >

How did GRUB even survive the formatting and how can I get rid of it for good so I can do a fresh install of Win 7?

No Time
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A. Franco
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  • Just do a fresh install of Windows. The windows installer will format the hard drive and take care of GRUB. – Panther Jun 27 '14 at 17:06

1 Answers1

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Format the drive using gparted and creating a new partition table in the MBR format. That will completely wipe the disk of grub, though it really won't affect your ability to boot to the disk drive, try pressing f12 at boot when the bios screen comes up and select cd drive. Wiping grub off the disk is done by the windows installer, and it does nothing to obstruct the cd boot process.

sbergeron
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  • I completely changed the boot order to exclude everything but the cd and have manually changed the boot device with f12 with no new results, unfortunately. Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but what is gparted and if I cant boot into Win 7 via USB or CD how can I use gparted? – A. Franco Jun 27 '14 at 22:02
  • I though you were able to boot from the ubuntu cd, if you can't I don't know what to tell you. If it still goes to grub rescue it means it's still booting from the hard drive – sbergeron Jun 27 '14 at 22:04
  • hadnt even tried ubuntu until you mentioned that. however, upon trying it with ubuntu 12.10 live disk, it failed with the same error. – A. Franco Jun 27 '14 at 23:52