Submissions consisting of the following are considered incomplete and will be removed: Please read our new rules page for more in-depth rules. Please do not submit the same issue more than once within 24 hours. Do everything you can to reduce the effort of the wonderful folks offering to help you.Īfter solving your problem, please mark it as solved by clicking 'flair' and confirming the 'solved' tag. State everything you have tried and all the guides/tutorials/sites you have followed as well as why they were unsuccessful. Try to research your issue before posting, don't be vague. The subreddit is only for support with tech issues.
Please include your system specs, such as Windows/Linux/Mac version/build, model numbers, troubleshooting steps, symptoms, etc. Live Chat ~Enter Discord~ Submission Guidelines If you're mounting any of the partitions on the HDD in Linux/*nix, check your fstab entries if you're using UUID or some other number-agnostic method, otherwise your mounts will break.Check out our Knowledge Base, all guides are compiled by our Trusted Techs. I'm not aware of any Linux distro that has configured GRUB to find the right partition via number - all should use UUID, it may be different for other OSes (I think UUID-based partition referencing only landed in Windows 8, not sure though). To safeguard for (1), check your Linux/*nix OSes if they're not using the partition for something ( /boot or whatever), in fstab.įor (2) - do you have any OSes left on the GPT disk? If so, you might want to check how your bootloader finds the right partition on that disk. partition numbering on that disk will shiftīefore moving on, check if all you OSes boot in BIOS/Legacy mode.Removing ESP (as in, deleting the partition from the table and not creating a new one) has 2 primary effects:
If you're using volume labels or UUIDs to identify the partitions in Ubuntu's /etc/fstab, you don't have to do anything in any case.ĭepending on what you have on the HDD, the easiest way to check is to just disconnect it and see if all your OSes boot without issue. In practice, it means if you're referring to the partitions on the HDD by the /dev/sd* device name in Ubuntu, you may have to adjust the partition number(s) for that disk by one. Removing the ESP may or may not affect the partition numbering, depending on whether the tool you use for the removal just marks the ESP's slot in the GPT partition table as unused or completely rebuilds the GPT partition table. So if you had such a special configuration, you would probably already be aware of more details of that specific UEFI implementation than possibly anyone else outside the engineering team that developed the system/motherboard.
In theory, an UEFI-capable system could be configured to first read an UEFI driver from ESP on one disk, and then start up a legacy compatibility layer to boot in legacy BIOS mode from another disk the UEFI firmware cannot directly access without the driver but that would be a very special configuration and I don't think most UEFI firmwares allow that kind of configuration to happen. If your system is really booting in legacy mode, then the ESP partition should absolutely be not a factor: it is essentially just a plain FAT32 partition in a GPT-partitioned disk with a specific partition type UUID. If there are problems, just plug the data cable back in.Īfter testing, remember to uncomment the /etc/fstab entries in Ubuntu you did comment out at the start. If both OSes still boot just fine, then you can be absolutely sure the ESP can be removed. It should be safe, but if you want to be absolutely sure, temporarily comment out any /etc/fstab entries referring to the data disk in Ubuntu, shutdown your system, temporarily unplug the data cable from the HDD and then verify your OSes are still bootable.