Reverting a Dual Boot Windows/Ubuntu

1

So I used to have a dual boot system with Windows for gaming stuff and Ubuntu for work, but I now have a separate machine for work so I dont use this Ubuntu anymore. Thats why I'd like to remove Ubuntu form my computer to free up some unused disk space. I currently have two SSDs : one hosting Ubuntu and the other hosting Windows. I assume removing ubuntu would be as simple as deleting all the volumes on the Ubuntu SSD, but I dont want to mess things up so I wanted to be sure.

Here is what the Windows partition manager reports :

Disk 0 has 3 partitions : Recovery for 529MB NTFS, EFI for 99MB and C for 222.9Gb NTFS.

Disk 1 has an other EFI partition for 513Mb and the Ubuntu partition for 223Gb.

What confuses me is the two EFI partitions, is it safe to remove the Disk1's EFI ? Thanks in advance.

Bruh

Posted 2019-11-16T12:21:32.993

Reputation: 13

Removing Disk 1's EFI partition should remove the boot option for Ubuntu from populating – JW0914 – 2019-11-16T12:30:21.210

Answers

0

An EFI partition of 500+ MB is typically created by the newer version of Windows 10. At some time in the past, Windows only needed about 100 MB.

Therefore I believe that the larger EFI is the one that you actually use, but better be sure.

To be sure, you may use Disk Management to assign a drive-letter to the partitions, so you can look at their content using Explorer. The one that is used will have two sub-folders for your two boot options. You may delete the one for Ubuntu if you don't need it any more.

If you find that the two EFI partitions have such two folders, I suggest deleting Ubuntu from both, just in case. As the EFI partitions are small, you do not gain much space from deleting them, so leave both in place.

Don't forget to remove the drive-letters when finished.

For safety, you could take an image backup of the disk or partition before modifications by a product such as AOMEI Backupper Freeware.

harrymc

Posted 2019-11-16T12:21:32.993

Reputation: 306 093

Hi. Dont seem to be able to assign letter to efi partitions from the partitioning utility. I was able to do so using diskpart command lines (select disk then select partition then assign letter). From here I could see them but not browse then on the file manager but found a trick online where they advised to use task manager -> new task -> browse. From the browse windows i could acess my EFI partitions. The 99mb one had an ubuntu entry which i removed. The 513MB one appeared to be empty tho... Am I safe to remove it completely ? – Bruh – 2019-11-16T17:12:10.750

It seems so, but why take a risk for a paltry 513 MB? – harrymc – 2019-11-16T17:16:56.213

Sure thing, thank you ! Can't upvote due to current reputation tho – Bruh – 2019-11-16T17:32:08.960

Asked: 2019-11-16T12:21:32.993

Viewed: 28 times

Active: 2019-11-16T12:40:01.767