Which partition is GRUB? How to remove?

Question

I have recently (attempted to) dual boot my Windows 10 laptop with Kali Linux. I could boot into Linux, but not into Windows. I found out I could press Fn + F12 while booting to choose a device, so I selected the hard drive and it booted to Windows. I changed attempted to remove Kali, but when I booted again it showed a black grub rescue> screen. I rebooted, presses Fn + F12, and did an advanced reboot and chose to use UEFI boot instead of Legacy. I am trying another dual-boot method now, so I'd like to remove GRUB. How do I determine which partition it is and how to remove it?

Answer 1

First ill start by saying it might be helpful to know that in most cases you probably don't really need(or would want) to get rid of it, it might be best to fix it so it boots the way you want, automatically(no hassle, minimal delay) into windows. Grub sits on a boot partition, or the first sectors of another partition. This is a superb(probably arguably the best we have)booter, and works fine for windows, and might be a much easier/safer solution. Then next time you reformat/reinstall you can full erase the entire drive letting windows clean it for you without lifting a finger, and can get quite messy/risky otherwise.

You will need to clean it off the partition if you want it gone, but you need to make sure you account for how your going to boot windows after if you do this, because you will likely break that part otherwise.

In windows see if the windows boot partition is still there, you might be able to just set the boot disk flag that the active boot partition, then reboot.

Failing that, if you really overwrote your standard windows booting procedure when you implemented your dual boot, then you will need to get down and dirty;

It depends on what software you using to attempt this. I like to use Systemrescuecd for this, its always a great tool for the job. Burn to usb thumb, or cd, boot to this. Once booted there, Select the default wizard options to boot into gui.

Once in Gentoo, on the desktop(with mouse control yes :-)), you can open your partition tools from there to view(or fix) grub, and check around.

To see your drive partitions you can open the terminal, type in fdisk -l.

This stack article points out how to see which partition grub is installed on.

Back up your entire partition table using gdisk, or other tools before you make any changes to the partitions, so you can get all your data back with NO loss if you accidentally trash your partition tables. Have patience if you do mess up your partition tables, you data will go no where. Take a screenshot of the partition table layout if you can too, use a digital camera if you have to for that one. This will be your only road-map back to your data if your partition table backup is invalid, unless you prefer years of untangling photorec and testdisk images, where your files are all renamed by number, and sorted by extension type, in full, that's a hard road.

You can use parted, or gdisk, depending on your needs to reformat, or you can look in the start menu there for the GUI tools. You can also get into grub easier here to adjust the configs if you need.

Barring the system rescue cd, i'm sure there's a way to do it all this in windows partition manager/rescue cd exclusively, but you wanted to learn right? :-)