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I am currently dual booting Ubuntu alongside Windows, with both installations being on the same hard drive, just different partitions, and I boot with GRUB. I want to reset windows, through settings with remove all files, but will this also remove GRUB and ubuntu? as I would like to keep them both, so i can continue dual booting, but start with a clean slate on Windows, still keeping everything in tact on ubuntu and the linux side of things.

TL;DR: can i reset windows but keep my ubuntu installation and GRUB?

Z2r
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  • I see the UEFI tag, so you are affirmative about that it's not a legacy MBR boot schema? It's UEFI, is it? – Levente Jan 19 '23 at 20:38
  • @Levente /sys/firmware/efi is present, so yes, I am using UEFI – Z2r Jan 19 '23 at 20:46
  • A reset of Windows will not delete other partitions. I guess though it will make Windows boot loader your main loader again. That is no problem. Run the Live Environment and make Grub the default loader again. See for example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/666631/how-to-get-grub-to-be-the-default-bootloader-instead-of-windows-boot-manager-on-a-UEFI-laptop or search for 'how to make grub default bootloader'. – Joepie Es Jan 19 '23 at 20:47
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    When I need to do something, I just do it. You gave no specifics as to what Ubuntu you're talking about, thus I can only be generic. In almost all cases you can correct whatever is lost during re-installs, but even if you can't; you can re-install a Ubuntu Desktop system without any loss of data, and have the manually installed packages you added post-install auto re-install (where from Ubuntu repositories) so non-destructive re-install is usually done in ~15 minutes anyway; but that's only ever the fallback if it can't be fixed. Your question answer is YES, but clean/fix up maybe required. – guiverc Jan 19 '23 at 21:39
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    Does this answer your question? How can I repair grub? (How to get Ubuntu back after installing Windows?) – karel Jan 20 '23 at 08:10
  • Installing windows will overwrite grub. You will need to reinstall grub through a live usb stick running linux. You can use the grub-install command for the terminal approach of reinstalling grub or the graphical way using the boot repair app. Reinstalling grub will not mess with your Ubuntu install though. – AamirA Jan 19 '23 at 22:04

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