Ubuntu – Delete all traces of windows from Ubuntu

grub2windows 7

I used to have a dual boot in one of my hard disk drives – Ubuntu and Windows 7. Then, I added a SSD which is now my main hard disk drive, and I'm using it for Windows 7 completely, keeping Ubuntu in the old HD. I restored the Grub so everything works ok, except for one thing.

Everytime I update the grub, it detects two windows:

Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sdb1

Obviously, I don't want it to detect the Windows on sdb1. Because I no longer use it (I manually deleted the files). What can I do about that without wiping out completely the partition?

Best Answer

I'm not sure what it uses to detect the OS. I'd try a quick reformat of the partitions.

If nothing else works, here is a patch that can be made to /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober that will allow you to specify any partitions you want to skip:

/etc/grub.d/30_os-prober modification

These lines can be added to the file (just past the middle) to skip any partitions that you don't want to show up in the menu. Leaving the string empty will skip nothing.

Add the lines starting with

############## Patch to prevent some partitions being autodetected

through

############## End of patch:

for OS in ${OSPROBED} ; do
  DEVICE="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 1`"
  LONGNAME="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 2 | tr '^' ' '`"
  LABEL="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 3 | tr '^' ' '`"
  BOOT="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 4`"

  ############## Patch to prevent some partitions being autodetected
  SKIP_THESE_DEVICES="sdb1"
  # SKIP_THESE_DEVICES="sda1 sdb1 sdb2"   example for multiple devices
  # SKIP_THESE_DEVICES=""                 example for no devices

  PARTITIONNAME="`echo ${DEVICE} | cut -c 6- 2> /dev/null`"
  if [ "`echo ${SKIP_THESE_DEVICES} | grep -e ${PARTITIONNAME} 2> /dev/null`" ] ; then
    continue
  fi
  ############## End of patch

  if [ -z "${LONGNAME}" ] ; then
    LONGNAME="${LABEL}"
  fi

After changing this file, you will, of course, need to run sudo update-grub to regenerate the menu. You should be able to see the results from the terminal's output when it says "Found ..." for each entry; you can run it first before the mods, then compare the output to after the mods. You should not see the removed entries.

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