Wednesday, May 1, 2019

boot - Remove second hard drive OS from grub



Years ago i installed ubuntu on a hard drive in my computer. A few days ago, after the release of 18.04, i bought a ssd and reinstalled everything on that. The old hdd is still linked in the computer - just to look up things.




GRUB does index the old hdd as secondary boot option. But i will never ever boot the old system again. So is there any way to remove the old hard drive from the grub options?



Short Answer



If you don't want third party utilities you can do it with a move command:



sudo mv /mnt/extra_distro/boot /mnt/extra_distro/boot.old



Then sudo update-grub of course.



Long Answer



Grub's OS_Prober checks each mounted drive for presence of /boot/* entries of vmlinuz* and initrd.img*. Then adds those options to your booted instance of grub. On my system for example:



$ sudo mount-menu.sh
Mount Partition



      ┌───────────┤ Use arrow, page, home & end keys. Tab toggle option ├────────────┐
      │ NAME        FSTYPE  LABEL                    SIZE MOUNTPOINT                 │ 
      │                                                                              │ 
      │ sda                                        931.5G                           ↑│ 
      │ ├─sda4      ntfs    WINRETOOLS               450M                           ▒│ 
      │ ├─sda2                                       128M                           ▒│ 
      │ ├─sda5      ntfs    Image                   11.4G                           ▒│ 
      │ ├─sda3      ntfs    HGST_Win10               919G /mnt/d                    ▒│ 
      │ └─sda1      vfat    ESP                      500M                           ▒│ 
      │ nvme0n1                                      477G                           ▒│ 

      │ ├─nvme0n1p5 ntfs                             858M                           ▒│ 
      │ ├─nvme0n1p3                                   16M                           ▒│ 
      │ ├─nvme0n1p1 ntfs                             450M                           ▒│ 
      │ ├─nvme0n1p8 ntfs    Shared_WSL+Linux           9G /mnt/e                    ▒│ 
      │ ├─nvme0n1p6 ext4    Ubuntu18.04             23.7G                           ▮│ 
      │ ├─nvme0n1p4 ntfs    NVMe_Win10             390.4G /mnt/c                    ▒│ 
      │ ├─nvme0n1p2 vfat                              99M /boot/efi                 ▒│ 
      │ ├─nvme0n1p9 swap    Linux Swap               7.9G [SWAP]                    ▒│ 
      │ └─nvme0n1p7 ext4    NVMe_Ubuntu_16.0        44.6G /                         ↓│ 
      │                                                                              │ 

      │                                                                              │ 
      │

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