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I recently set up a dual boot of Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 8.1 Enterprise. I booted off a USB stick and had it install alongside Windows rather than over top of it. It installed perfectly, bootloader was great, etc. I decided I didn't like the version of Linux I had chosen, so without looking up a tutorial I went to remove Linux. On the windows side I deleted the Linux partitions, but didn't do anything about restoring the windows boot loader.

Unsurprisingly (in hindsight), I couldn't boot into Windows, and got grub command line every time I attempted. Using a Windows recovery disk I attempted to fix it with the recovery console commands bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot neither of which worked. I got to a bootable Windows by reinstalling the OS overtop of everything. Never saw grub command line again. However, there are still traces of Ubuntu in certain places. In UEFI, the Hard Disk is specified as using Windows Boot Manager which I found peculiar. So I opened the Hard Disk BBS Priorities and sure enough there are two ubuntu options. I also noticed that if I go to Advanced Startup in Windows, choose Use a Device, ubuntu appears twice as an option.

So far the steps I've taken to try and fix this are:

  • Using recovery console, rebuildbcd which failed
  • Using command prompt, bcdedit which returned no entry about ubuntu
  • Mounting the EFS partition of C: and deleting the ubuntu directory (failed)
  • Going into msconfig to delete Ubuntu. Ubuntu wasn't present.

After a few days of googling I am completely out of ideas for what I can search for to find tutorials for this specific problem, because I'm not familiar with the places I'm finding ubuntu traces. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to remove the last of Ubuntu on this machine?

M H
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2 Answers2

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What you're seeing are NVRAM entries. You can delete them in Windows using EasyUEFI, or using an Ubuntu live CD with the efibootmgr command-line program. (You'll type sudo efibootmgr to see the entries, then delete them with sudo efibootmgr -b {####} -B, where {####} is the four-digit hexadecimal number for an entry found with the first efibootmgr command.)

That said, these entries are basically harmless, so long as they aren't set as the default. You can safely ignore them.

For future reference, re-installing Windows was drastic overkill. Most computers provide an EFI boot manager that you can access by hitting Esc, Enter, or a function key (usually something in the F8-F12 range). Using that, you could have booted Windows, then used bcdedit or EasyUEFI to reset the Windows boot loader as the default.

Rod Smith
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  • Thanks so much, your solution worked perfectly. I'm glad to know they were harmless entries. I'll keep your advice in mind if I ever cause this problem to happen again. – M H Oct 30 '15 at 04:32
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You need to mount the UEFI partition in Windows.

Do that from an administrative command prompt.

diskpart
list partition
select partition x:
assign letter=b (or whatever available disk letter you want)
exit (that only exits diskpart)

in same admin prompt:

taskkill /im explorer.exe /f
explorer.exe (launches explorer with admin rights)

after that, I recommend unmounting the UEFI partition when you are done.

solsTiCe
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ccp
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