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I hav a single nvme disk on my laptop with two uefi O.S. installed: Ubuntu 17 and Windows 10.

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I would like to completely remove Windows 10 and reuse the freed space for my Ubuntu 17. Obviously I don't want to loose any data I have in Ubuntu and it would be great to hide the grub2 screen at startup in order to boot directly to the existing Ubuntu installation.

I went through the existing answers but I didn't find anything related to my scenario.
The only answer relevant for my problem is this one but when I tried the ubuntu installation, the screen reported never showed up. I was only allowed to reinstall Ubuntu (destroying data).

Is there someone able to give me a step by step guide in order to safely get rid of my Windows 10 Partition?

Thanks a lot.

Paolo Laurenti
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  • Don't think it's a good idea. Removing either grub or the efi partition will make both Ubuntu and Windows unbootable. Not sure about safety, but it would be a very silly thing to do. – mikewhatever Jul 08 '17 at 16:29
  • Do you want to remove the Windows 10 partition as stated in your question or the EFI partition as you say in the title? Removing the EFI would render your machine unbootable and would only free 100MB anyway. Is that really what you mean? Please [edit] your question and clarify what you are trying to do. – terdon Jul 08 '17 at 16:52
  • Thanks @terdon for your suggestions. The goal is to remove the Windows 10 partition and reuse the freed space. I've removed all the references to EFI partition in my question in order to better clarify my need. Let me know if it's ok or if I can improve my question more. – Paolo Laurenti Jul 08 '17 at 16:56
  • Thanks, that's better! Now, please also explain why you want to remove grub as well. I can see no reason to do so and it sounds like an XY problem. What benefit do you expect to see from removing grub? – terdon Jul 08 '17 at 16:58
  • @terdon probably you're right again :-). My goal about grub is the following: once Windows will be removed I will have only one O.S. installed (Ubuntu 17). At that point I would like to boot directly to Ubuntu without any Grub screen shown at startup. Here's the reason why I wrote "get rid of grub2". – Paolo Laurenti Jul 08 '17 at 17:06
  • OK, that's what I thought. You don't want to remove grub (you could, but it is very complicated for no reason) you just want to hide it and boot straight into Ubuntu. Follow the instructions in ravery's answer below then. – terdon Jul 08 '17 at 17:08
  • OK, I've changed a little the question in order to better clarify the need about Grub2. – Paolo Laurenti Jul 08 '17 at 17:13

1 Answers1

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Grub is the boot loader, it can be replaced; however with a single installation it can be hidden and set to auto select, so you will never see it. The EFI partition is also required for boot. DO NOT delete it.

Partitions 3 and 4 can be deleted.
Then you have the option of growing partition 5 or making a data partition that you mount into your system.

If you plan to grow partition 5, I recommend doing it from a LiveCD. Manipulating mounted partitions can be dangerous.

After you have removed windows, edit /etc/default/grub.
change GRUB_TIMEOUT=0, this make grub immediately select the default option.
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true, this hides grub.
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true, this stops grub from looking for other OS's when updating.

then sudo update-grub

if your windows partition is auto mounted, you will have to edit etc/fstab also to remove the entry for it.

ravery
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  • Grub isn't actually required to boot. The kernel EFI image can be directly loaded by systemd. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd-boot – terdon Jul 08 '17 at 16:55
  • @terdon -- thank you. in effect grub is replaced with a different loader (systemd-boot) which will only load the linux kernel. similar to the method of windows bootmgr – ravery Jul 08 '17 at 16:59
  • @ravery thanks a lot. Everything worked fine. Only one note: in order to hide the grub menu I had to set also GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true and GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true. Here (https://askubuntu.com/questions/111085/how-do-i-hide-the-grub-menu-showing-up-at-the-beginning-of-boot) I found more details. Do you mind to improve your answer with these little changes? After that I will accept it as solved. Thanks. – Paolo Laurenti Jul 08 '17 at 17:53
  • @PaoloLaurenti -- updated – ravery Jul 08 '17 at 18:16
  • This answer is correct; however: (1) If either Windows partition holds data that should be preserved, it should of course be backed up before proceeding; and (2) resizing a partition from its start point is always somewhat risky. Creating a new partition and mounting it somewhere else is safer, but may reduce flexibility. – Rod Smith Jul 09 '17 at 14:53