Old redundant Windows 10 boot manager entries after clean installation

Question

I wiped my drive (/dev/sda) which contained previous Windows 10 installation by using gdisk in Arch (which is installed on /dev/sdb) and choosing z for zap (wiping GPT) and deleting whole partitions by choosing the o option.

Then I tried a clean installation of Windows 10 on that empty drive (/dev/sda).

However, as you can see on the picture, Windows 10 still somehow magically finds entries of previous Windows 10 installations, even though I wiped my drives entirely.

I read about bcdedit, but where does windows' boot manager get the information from? Can this information somehow be stored on /dev/sdb?

I /dev/sda several times, and still it manages to get the information about previous installations.

Answer 1

I'm not all that familiar with the Windows boot manager; however, your description makes it sound as if it's reading data from the EFI's boot manager store in NVRAM. You can access this boot list in a number of ways, including:

• bcdedit in Windows -- I'm unfamiliar with the details of this approach, beyond adding new entries.
• EasyUEFI in Windows -- This third-party tool presents a GUI menu in which you can add, delete, and re-order boot entries. It's likely to be the easiest one for you to use and experiment.
• efibootmgr in Linux -- This tool does what EasyUEFI does, but in a text-mode way from Linux. Since you mentioned Arch Linux, check the Arch wiki entry on efibootmgr for details.
• bcfg in an EFI shell -- If you run an EFI shell (v2, not the older v1), the bcfg command can be useful. The Arch wiki also has information on this command.