Using ddrescue to uninstall Linux from a Multiboot Windows machine

[Shahrukh Merchant]

"What?" you may ask. "Ddrescue is for recovering data from damaged 
drives, what does it have to do with uninstalling anything, let alone 
operating systems?" Hang in there, let me explain. :-)

As my previous thread indicated, I've been playing around with creating 
dual-boot Linux systems. I finally decided I want to uninstall Linux 
Mint completely from the system and do something else (the "something 
else" is not relevant for this discussion).

Now, Linux Mint doesn't come with an uninstaller, but it seems to boil 
down to doing two things:

1. Remove the Linux partition(s) and files (easy, especially if it's all 
on one partition--just delete the partition(s) if you don't have any 
user data on them).

2. Patch the bootloader so that it boots properly, i.e., reinstall the 
Windows bootloader. This seems to be the problem since apparently grub 
gets confused if one of the OS's it was expecting to find mysteriously 
disappears--it doesn't offer to load the other, it just aborts. The 
usual solution seems to be to create a Windows System Rescue disk and 
then go into troubleshooting and find your way down to a command prompt 
in the Windows recovery environment that lets you run a program 
"bootrec.exe /fixmbr" that, you got it, "fixes" the MBR.

But it seems I can use ddrescue to do both of these two steps in one go 
and far simply (not to mention in much less time) while knowing exactly 
what it did (as opposed to taking it on faith that "bootrec /fixmbr" 
restored things back to exactly the way they were before).

Before the Linux install (yes I have to plan and do this in advance):
        ddrescue -d -v -s1s /dev/sda mbrimage mapfile1
(saves the MBR pre Linux install)

[Then I do my Linux stuff: install Linux, create a new partition on 
unallocated space on my drive, replace the Windows bootloader with grub 
and it's dual-boot capability, do whatever I want to on Linux. Then, I 
decide I want to uninstall Linux completely.]

To uninstall Linux, I believe all I would need to do in the above 
scenario is:
        ddrescue -d -f -v -s1s mbrimage /dev/sda mapfile2
(restores previous MBR)

And I'm done! Restoring the original MBR would eliminate the new Linux 
partition(s) and restore the Windows bootloader all in one fell swoop, 
would it not? As long as:
- I didn't make any partition changes to Windows partitions I want to 
keep after doing my initial MBR backup
- I saved mbrimage somewhere other than on a RAM drive :-)

Can anyone see any problem with this? I DO have the pre-Linux-install 
MBR saved (actually I did a full drive image using ddrescue "just in 
case," but I would only restore Sector 1).

Shahrukh