My set-up of Linux Mint and GRUB seems to have messed up my Windows drive, as now I can’t boot from it directly anymore, but only by going through GRUB first, and I want to uninstall Linux. How would I go about figuring out the issue and fixing it?

As for why I want to uninstall Linux, it’s mostly two reasons 1: My father gave me a spare HDD he had since I’m not a fan of buying things when you already have them. Turns out (coming from a teen who’s been booting from an SSD for most of their life) HDDs are slow, too slow for my liking. 2: Linux, Mint at least, feels incomplete, sort of like a tech demo, with extremely limited support for anything that wasn’t directly intended by the developers. The concept of having to compile something yourself is basically foreign to me, and the few times I had to do it in Windows I could easily find a way around it. Plus having to basically rely on a built-in app database/store to easily install apps… Kinda stinks to me, and not being able to simply download an installer from a website and having the program, whatever program, up and running reliably within a minute, the concept seems ridiculous… I’m not sure, I could be really spoiled by Windows 10, or simply too used to it.

TLDR: HDDs are slower than I thought and Linux doesn’t seem good for people like me

Ps: Yes, I know, mass storage is “super cheap” nowdays, but for someone who only reliably gets money during their birthday and Christmas, €20 may as well be €200

Also, I am pretty sure that I will come back to Linux in the future once Windows has devolved to the point of being garbage (which from what I’ve seen might be very close) and I’ve gotten better at general computer usage (which may be close too since I’m starting to familiarize myself with CLIs)

  • harpo@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    13·
    1 year ago

    As the Linux slogan used to be a few years back, “it’s about choice”. I get very much the same feeling you decribe when I have to do anything in windows. Having to hunt for software on the web, shady sites posing as legitimate download sources… Having a “built-in app database” is great, as long as you’re free to add software from other places, or extend the database itself if you feel like it. Many of the software we take for granted in Linux is hard to find, expensive and/or shady in Windows. It’s really up to what you’re used to, and there’s no shame in trying an alternate system and not liking it.

    Anyway, to answer your question.

    You say “I can’t boot from it directly anymore, but only by going through GRUB first”. I’m assuming that simply means GRUB appears when booting, and you simply haven’t tried booting windows standalone.

    I’m assuming your computer is reasonably recent and uses EFI as a boot system.

    • In EFI, there is a special partition at the beginning of the drive, which contains the bootloaders for all systems.
    • Since you have Linux and Windows installed, you should have 2 bootloaders there: GRUB and the Windows bootloader
    • The BIOS in your system must have a menu somewhere to choose which one to boot.
    • Go into the BIOS on system startup, look for the boot order, and you should see both bootloaders, change the priority so the Windows bootloader goes first, reboot and you’re done.
    • Now you can remove the Linux partitions using your favourite partition management software.