Uninstall HowTo

How to Uninstall Ndiswrapper

Starting with version 1.0, you can uninstall programs and modules installed with make uninstall in ndiswrapper directory. This won’t remove Windows drivers installed in /etc/ndiswrapper; for that, you should ndiswrapper -r driver command. Rest of this document shouldn’t be necessary to uninstall. However, should you have problems, follow it and see if make uninstall fails to remove anything and report that to mailing list or forums.

• Make sure you unload your current ndiswrapper module with ‘modprobe -r ndiswrapper’
• You need to remove the user space tools ndiswrapper (in /usr/sbin) and loadndisdriver (in /sbin), and kernel module ndiswrapper (in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc). If these files are not in these locations, then they may have been installed elsewhere (e.g., user spaces tools may be installed in /usr/bin). You can use which or locate command to now where the user space tools are located (e.g., which ndiswrapper gives the location of ndiswrapper tool). Once these are located, remove them; e.g., rm ndiswrapper. Note that the kernel module file is called ndiswrapper.o in 2.4 kernels and ndiswrapper.ko in 2.6 kernels.
• Alternately, you can use locate to find where ndiswrapper files are stored. First, update the database used by locate with updatedb. This takes sometime and when it is done, run locate ndiswrapper and remove all the files listed and then run locate loadndisdriver and remove all the files listed.
• If locate doesn’t find the module, you can use find instead: find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -name “ndiswrapper*” -print will print the location of the modules. You should then remove all the files printed.
• ndiswrapper installs Windows drivers under /etc/ndiswrapper directory. If you want to uninstall just a specific Windows driver, first list the drivers installed with ndiswrapper -l. If you then want to remove, say, driver “bcmwl5”, then remove it with ndiswrapper itself with ndiswrapper -r bcmwl5. If that doesn’t work, just remove the directory /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmcwl5 (e.g., with /bin/rm -rf /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5). If you want to uninstall all Windows drivers, then remove /etc/ndiswrapper (e.g,. with /bin/rm -rf /etc/ndiswrapper).
• ndiswrapper -m (creates and) installs an alias in /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper. If you want to remove this alias (since you might not want ndiswrapper module to be loaded when using wlan0 network interface), remove it: rm -f /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper