Help! Linux boot issues.

[Chandrodoy]

My asus laptop has a hdd with three partitions  one of which has windows

And a blank new SSD.

 

I installed linux mint on the ssd for a while.

 

It booted with grub.

 

but due to poor touchpads support  I wanted to uninstall it.

 

I booted into a live linux usb and formatted the SSD. Did the same from windows and formatted the SSD to NTFS..it now shows up as a blank 111gb drive, as it was unused.

However, the in the boot menu, ubuntu still shows up and opens up grub when selected....I tried deleting the boot partition from bios, it didn't work. No  wifi files anywhere  ...

 

What do I do? I want to completely clear the SSD and remove the grub..

 

 

 

[mahyar]

well you screwed up your os i suggest a clean install of both windows and linux

[Guest]

Grub probably installed to the Windows UEFI Partition.

 

You will need a Linux Live Install Media

• Boot to the Linux Live Install Media Desktop of your choice.
• Look for a Fat32 partition on the drive that contains your windows install.
• Remove anything in the partition that references Grub, Ubuntu, Linux, or Mint

 

Open a Terminal.

• efibootmgr
  • It will give you a list of entries like "Boot0003* Arch Linux", The last number is what you will be needing, in this instance the number is 3 or 0003
• efibootmgr -b number_of_entry -B

restart your system.

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, mahyar said:

well you screwed up your os i suggest a clean install of both windows and linux

Why? The OP didn't screw up anything. If a Live Installer detects a EFI partition it has a tendency to re-use it regardless of what drive its located on. The files just need deleted and the entry removed. There is no reason to re-install anything.

[Chandrodoy]

Anyway to do it without a live media? I have one flash drive only, and I wanted to test if installing windows on the SSD works....so removed the live media and it's now installing windows...

Quote

8 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Boot to the Linux Live Install Media Desktop of your choice.

 

 

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, Chandrodoy said:

Anyway to do it without a live media? I have one flash drive only, and I wanted to test if installing windows on the SSD works....so removed the live media and it's now installing windows...

 

I am not aware of a way, but I am not familiar enough with Windows to know.

Your SSD should be fine. The boot Entry is stored on the Bios and the Grub files are stored on your current Windows EFI partition.

Installing something to the SSD won't make a difference, if you formatted it then it's empty.

[Chandrodoy]

Apologies for being a complete noob.

 

Guys, all i wanna do is get windows running on the SSD, as linux makes the touchpad crappy(tried a lot of things...doesn't help.).

 

So... Will the grub cause a problem? If I freshly install windows on the SSD, will I be able to boot without the grub coming in the way?

 

In that case can I just leave the ubuntu Boot partition?will it cause a problem?

 

 

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Chandrodoy said:

So... Will the grub cause a problem?

It shouldn't cause any issues.

 

6 minutes ago, Chandrodoy said:

If I freshly install windows on the SSD, will I be able to boot without the grub coming in the way?

Yes. You may just need to change your boot order. However if your installing Windows to the SSD and formatting the old Windows install, it should delete the grub files with it.

 

6 minutes ago, Chandrodoy said:

In that case can I just leave the ubuntu Boot partition?will it cause a problem?

GRUB is actually in your current Windows Boot Partition. leaving it won't do any harm. see above.

 

For future reference, to help prevent complications with boot. I would disconnect all other drives apart from the one your installing to. Once your done installing, reconnect them. This will prevent it from sharing partitions.

[Chandrodoy]

Thank you so much sir/Ma'am , for the help.

 

I used diskpart right now..and you were right, and there is this inaccessible 200mb fat32 partition. Grub that's where grub is ..

 

And as u said...there is not gonna be much problem if I install windows on the new drive, so I'm doing that ig...

[Jurien72]

 

I had this same exact problem. I'm assuming Windows boots still? If so, you can do this. (Be careful)

 

From Admin Command, run:
mountvol U: /s
dir /A /S U:\

If there's a loader.efi type:
del /F U:\path\loader.efi ====> Replace the path
if there's a ubuntu folder, type:
RD /S /Q "U:\EFI\ubuntu"
mountvol U:\ /D

Reboot.

 

I'm guessing your folder will say Mint or something like that. Hope this helps!

Edited August 22, 2020 by Jurien72
Added some info to clarify

[Wild Penquin]

Also, in many (all?) desktop computers one can remove active EFI boot entries via BIOS.

 

How exactly (i.e. where exactly in the menus) depends on the manufacturer. You didn't specify your laptop model or manufacturer, but it doesn't hurt to just enter BIOS menus and try to look them from there, or consult the manual of your laptop. There's one big caveat: some laptop manufacturers don't provide a BIOS entry to control this, so the UEFI will scan the EFI partition but there is no way to manage which entries are in use.

 

I bet there are GUIs to manage the EFI partition for Windows, but I don't use Windows so I'm not aware of them. A search engine should be able to find them, so you might not need to do this from the command line.

 

Also, lesson learned: multi-boot systems always have something else than just the OS (partition) installed. This is one way to learn it. It has always been like this with any dual-boot (including Linux) installations, and will be for a long time, since there is really no other way to achieve multiboot. If you want to uninstall, you need to figure out how to remove the bootloader, preferentially before removing the actual OS partition(s), since it might be easier from the OS which installed it in the first place. Actually, Ubuntu might have (and if it doesn't, they should make one) a guide for uninstallation from PCs, which might be useful (actually just a generic "how to remove Grub from EFI -guide should suffice).

 

Also, I must concur with the poor touchpad support. After all, it does require quite a bit of development and Q/C to get the input to behave, especially multi-finger gestures. Libinput has way better support than synaptics, however some touchpads are proprietary and might not have good low-level drivers in Linux (result: the result will be bad despite what library you use). Not sure which library Ubuntus (and Linux Mint) use this days (synaptics or libinput), but if it is the former, swapping to the latter is definitely not a job for a linux newb.

Edited August 23, 2020 by Wild Penquin
one TYPO (driver->library)