Member Avatar for mah300274

At the time of when I installed Debian on my computer I also had 2 other windows restores / boot. I still have windows but I did another install of windows to clean my drives / get everything organized. When I formatted the old drive where the windows were installed Debian boot screen still has them for an option and then if I select then my computer will say missing bootmgr (because windows is not there anymore). I would mainly like to clean up the screen, how do I do this?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by JasonHippy

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This is a common result of removing Windows partitions: GRUB still shows entries that point at the old Windows bootloader and selecting them gives "missing bootmgr". was right to suggest regenerating the GRUB menu — if that didn’t remove the stale items, use the steps below to find what created them and remove them safely.

First, find the exact menu entries in GRUB’s generated file so you know what name to remove and which generator made it:

grep -n "menuentry" /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Open the surrounding lines in that file and look for comments like ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober — those comments identify which grub.d script produced each section. If the Windows entries are created by 30_os-prober, they were auto-detected; if they fall under 40_custom (or another custom script) they were added manually.

If os-prober is producing the stale entries, either stop it from running or remove the package. To stop detection, add this line to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true

If the entries were added by a custom script, edit or remove the offending file in /etc/grub.d/ (for example, remove the Windows block from /etc/grub.d/40_custom). Do not edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg by hand — it is regenerated and your edits will be lost.

On UEFI systems the menu may chainload the Windows Boot Manager from the EFI system partition. Inspect the EFI tree and firmware entries:

ls /boot/efi/EFI
efibootmgr -v

If you find a Microsoft folder in the ESP or an NVRAM boot entry, remove them only after confirming Windows is gone and you have a recovery medium.

After making the configuration edits above, recreate GRUB’s configuration so the menu is rebuilt (the operation suggested by ). Back up files first and keep a live USB handy before changing boot settings.

Member Avatar for JasonHippy

Try this:

sudo update-grub

Or this:

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

That should reconfigure and update the grub2 bootloader menu.

Edited by JasonHippy because: n/a
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