how to remove windows xp after installing ubuntu

[songofshane]

the situation is, i installed ubuntu just to check it out. after installation i decided i like it and i now want to remove my windows OS. how could i do it? ive been all around google trying to find some solution. is there some way to remove the windows OS without completely installing ubuntu again?

[zenwalker]

Not a way both sufficient and practical at your stage in the game, I'm afraid.

You'll need two things -- the first to do the job now and the latter to avoid having to do it the same way again, in the future -- System Rescue CD and Clonezilla

Choose version 1.3.5 of sysresccd and burn it at no more than 8X to CD.

I'd recommend booting to sysresccd, hitting defaults a couple times, then at the green and blue prompt on the page that asks for user to type in either "wizard" or "startx" type in at the prompt this command to wipe your hard drive completely with zeros, eliminating all chance of ntfs and all that other nasty stuff from defiling your virgin linux system:

 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 conv=notrunc,sync 
  

Afer it's done (go make a sandwich and watch the second quarter of the game), type in
startx then, at the yellow-colored terminal, gparted and do your partitioning.

Once you have the installation and tweaks as you desire them, use Clonezilla to back the entire drive up so you won't have to go through all the rigamorole ubuntu makes you go through to get things right, again. Check out SuperOS

Best wishes!
Welcome!

[oz]

is there some way to remove the windows OS without completely installing ubuntu again?

Hello and welcome to the forums!

Yes, it's certainly possible to remove Windows and avoid reinstalling Ubuntu, but if you aren't comfortable with manipulating partitions and manually editing system configuration files, I believe you will find that a fresh install with Ubuntu and allowing it to overwrite Windows will be the much faster and cleaner option.

Either way, it's highly recommended that you make a full backup of your current Windows system just in case anything goes wrong, or you should decide you want Windows back again.

[sgosnell]

It really depends on how you did the Ubuntu install. If you used wubi, I don't know that there is a way to remove Windows without doing a real reinstallation of Ubuntu. If you did a real install of Ubuntu, on a separate partition, it's not hard. Just mount the Windows partition, and use gparted to format it. Windows is gone. You can then remove the partition and grow the Ubuntu partition to use the unallocated space, or just keep the partition as it is, and use it for data or whatever you like. I agree that you should keep a backup of your Windows partition, and there are several ways to do that. It's not possible to have too many backups, but it is always possible to have too few, and most people eventually find that they are in that situation.