The annual Windows re-install

For some reason my Windows install was misbehaving worse than usual lately. It was having problems booting for the last two weeks – hanging at the loading screen and such. I run a dual boot system, but overwhelmingly favour Ubuntu for almost all tasks. I only keep Windows around to run games and to use a VPN to connect to work. Well, I don’t need VPN now 🙂

So I decided to re-install Windows, and while I was at it, I got rid of my FAT32 partition and switched it to ext3. Not really much point in keeping a partition to share stuff between Windows and Linux when I don’t do anything in Windows any more.

Re-installing was quite easy, if a little time-consuming. It took about 2 hours, and of course I had to repair GRUB afterwards, because Microsoft like to take over the MBR. But that was as easy as firing up a live CD and issuing a few GRUB commands. There were the other usual minor annoyances of course: by default, my network card(s) aren’t recognised, so I had to download a driver in Ubuntu and then reboot into Windows to install it; and I had to reboot Windows multiple times to get all the other various drivers installed.

But now I have a clean Windows installation, so I can just keep it that way, and play a few games.

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