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I have two HD, one with windows 8 installed and on the other with Ubuntu 17.04 that I installed using a bootable USB drive. This worked in the beginning as I was able to boot into windows and Ubuntu fine initially but my system was left unused for sometime and then I faced a grub screen with a prompt. So I somehow booted into windows and formatted the HD with Ubuntu 17.04 into NTFS hoping I will get rid of the grub screen but now I can't even boot into the windows. Now, i am faced with a grub screen when I power on my computer and unable to get past that screen. I have found some posts that talk about removing grub but that has not worked for me.

Balwant Chandel
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    Possible duplicate of How to remove GRUB Nothing is Working! – vidarlo Apr 29 '18 at 20:41
  • Hey thanks jdwolf, here is an update - i reinstalled ubuntu yesterday on the second hdd after setting up partition as follow: created efi partition 600 mb , root 20 gb, swap 13 gb, rest home. Tried to install boot loader in the efi but it was not getting listed under the boot loader partitions so had to choose the entire /home folder. After that it worked fine yesterday , i still had no access to windoWS or my primary is on first hdd as ut was nit listed during thw booting options. But atleast system was workable so it was good until today when i ended at grub rescue prompt – Balwant Chandel May 05 '18 at 19:09

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In UEFI systems which you probably have GRUB is stored in the EFI System Partition and NVram. You can "remove" Grub in the sense that your UEFI won't know its there by mounting your ESP and deleting EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi

Your motherboard may also keep this entry around even after you delete the file (but it won't try to boot it) in which case you have to go into your UEFI menu and delete it from there as well.

This obviously doesn't touch the installation of grub on ubuntu so you can reinstall it if you wanted later.

jdwolf
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I went into the BIOS and just changed the boot order. Not sure if that helps anyone but I just moved Ubuntu below my Windows one and got a normal windows startup. I installed the WebODM/LiveODM Lubuntu 20.04 image onto a USB flash drive and then used the flash drive to install it on the external USB hard drive for drone mapping. I think you could reasonably assume it's not to much different than other versions of Ubuntu. To enter BIOS the process is different on every computer so you'll probably have to figure that one out if your not familiar. But I'd think most people using Ubuntu are probably familiar with the BIOS.

On a sidenote if WebODM/LiveODM users find this post because your frustrated it won't work because of grub or grub2, and follow the same process described, but run into error code 134, running "sudo apt update" then "sudo apt upgrade". Don't know why it worked but it did. I know enough to be dangerous, not a professional.

srg9832
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