I had Ubuntu 18 on my laptop and then I got windows 10 installed on it after removing Ubuntu 18. Then I installed kubuntu 22 alongwith windows 10. Then I installed fedora 36 alongwith windows 10 and kubuntu 36.
The problem is that the windows isn’t starting after a system restore failed. So I need to remove windows 10 completely from my system including partition and boot menu and I don’t want this to affect any of my other operating systems while I want to use the partition of windows on kubuntu and fedora.
Current partition
Windows
C (os)
D (data)
Ubuntu
E (os)
F (data)
Fedora
G (os)
H (data)
Please help how to manage it from bios and partition manager on Linux without any data loss and redundance.
what kubuntu 36 newest version of kubuntu is 22.04
as you have said that you have removed windows partition then what does that mean
if you mean that you have removed windows partition and also data as (d)
and want to use this drive then i think you can create and format that partition and you can use that and if you want to reinstall windows having other 2 os like kubuntu and fedora this is hard as windows does not respect users fredom and remove all bootloader and overwrite that with its own
Is windows using uefi? If so then it would have partition 1 on the drive as the esp.
a. If it is using uefi then there is a bit of tweaking involve to complete the removal.
If the /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft/ directory exists then completion of removal includes deleting that directory (which contains the microsoft boot loader info) as well as deleting the other 3 partitions that are windows related.
The command sudo fdisk -l should return something like this.
$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for USER:
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 476.94 GiB, 512110190592 bytes, 1000215216 sectors
Disk model: INTEL SSDPEKNW512G8
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 406E2318-D071-4F12-A55C-75C1711D624E
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 534527 532480 260M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2 534528 567295 32768 16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/nvme0n1p3 567296 199752334 199185039 95G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p4 998473728 1000214527 1740800 850M Windows recovery environment
/dev/nvme0n1p5 199753728 201404415 1650688 806M Linux filesystem
/dev/nvme0n1p6 201404416 896079871 694675456 331.2G Linux LVM
As you can see I have fedora installed (using partitions nvme0n1p[156]) and windows (which uses partitions nvme0n1p[1234]).
Deleting windows for me would simply involve deleting partitions 2,3, &4 as well as making the change noted in 1 above.
Within fedora you would also need to update the grub.cfg (after completing 1 & 2 above) with sudo grub2-makeconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg to remove the menu entry for windows.
I have 2 EFI partitions on my drive. One is pre Linux distros (KU22&F36) installation and the second one, I added during Fedora partition. Which one can I delete safely?
Assuming that you want to remove everything windows related as stated above, then you can safely remove 13456 since all are microsoft/ntfs. This does, of course, assume you have no data you wish to retain in any of those partitions.
Once that is done a bit more analysis is needed to find out which of the 2 efi partitions could be removed.
The issue at this point is that you are typing in the way you interpret the data without showing the command used to get that data and without copying/pasting directly from the screen so we could exactly what you see.
Please post the output (command included) of lsblk within the </> Preformatted text tags available by clicking on that button on the toolbar above the text input window. Simply use your mouse to highlight (left click) and copy the text (right click menu selection) then paste that text into the input window (another right click).
I am sorry, but seem to have misunderstood when you said
That told me you were booting the installed version of fedora. That you are using live media is different since now nothing from the HDD is mounted.
If you have data on the fedora or kubuntu installs you wish to keep then backups would be advised before proceeding.
If there is no need to keep anything then a new clean install of both kubuntu and fedora would be the simplest path.
While booted to the live fedora media you can install and use gparted to partition the drive (wipe out unnecessary partitions and repartition as needed with only one efi partition)
The efibootmgr can easily be cleaned up after the system is reconfigured the way you want it instead of doing the same thing twice. Use man efibootmgr to get documented assistance in how to use it.
BTW
While booted to the live media you should be able to connect to the internet and open a browser there for posting and sharing what you see on the screen. That would seem much easier than manually typing it or taking and posting images.
With your latest post it seems the reason you are not able to boot windows is that you created the second esp partition and it does not contain the windows boot loader. The windows boot loader probably resides in /dev/sda2 and fedora grub boot loader probably resides in /dev/sda9.
I’ve Ubunutu and Fedora installed on my system and I’m using Ubuntu Live USB flash drive as it was advised by someone online.
Now, the problem is that after deleting windows partitions, I need to remove one EFI partition and I also need to remove redundant entries from the remaining EFI partition. I don’t want to reinstall both Linux operating systems.
Do you think is it a good idea to remove all the partitions via USB live and reinstall again? Will that fix the EFI partition issue as I don’t know if a single EFI partition will work for both Ubuntu and Fedora if I install one OS after the other one?
Yes, both can and will use the same efi partition. It does require that you are careful to know which grub is in charge when updates occur so that you can carefully manage grub but otherwise they are fully compatible using uefi.