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Surprisingly I have been unable to find an answer to how to completely remove Windows 10 from a machine. I happen to have an Alienware 15 R2.

The target O/S is Ubuntu 15.10 . No, I have no desire for dual-boot. Just kill windows.

I have already done the following:

 Legacy Mode (instead of UEFI)
 Secure Boot (disabled it)

Now how to proceed?

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    Just format the hdd from within a gparted boot
    – Ramhound
    Feb 20, 2016 at 6:01

4 Answers 4

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Boot up with a Linux disk, then run the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 count=1" where /dev/sdX is the hard drive you are wanting to clear - this command overwrites the boot sector and partition table of your drive, making it appear uninitialised.

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  • Yes that is what I wanted.
    – WestCoastProjects
    Feb 20, 2016 at 7:11
  • This will sort-of work. The trouble is that it leaves the GPT backup partition data intact, which could confuse some partitioning tools down the road. If this doesn't happen immediately, a fresh installation of a new OS using GPT partitions will overwrite the old data; but in this case there's no need to wipe the starting data -- just delete the old partitions and create new ones in their place, as ek.bic suggests. If you want to completely wipe the old data, sudo sgdisk -Z /dev/sda in Ubuntu will do the job completely (for /dev/sda).
    – Rod Smith
    Feb 22, 2016 at 2:38
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First of all, back up your data! Use Gparted to delete the partition you have Windows on. You could use it to delete the partition and add it to the one you have Ubuntu installed on. OS-Uninstaller is also another option. If you want to use Gparted, Evan Kroske has written an step-by-step walk-through:

Assuming you have installed Ubuntu on a separate partition, all you have to do is remove your Windows partition and remove the Windows option from your GRUB boot menu.

  1. Make sure your backups of your documents (and other important files, such as ebooks, videos, music, and so forth) are current. If you are going to expand the Ubuntu partition to take up the space freed by removing your Windows partition, then this is especially important, as there is always some risk (though small) of data loss when performing dynamic partition resizing. However, even if you are not planning to do this, unless you are highly experienced with repartitioning, there is a significant risk that you may make a mistake (you probably will not, but if you do, you want the consequences to be minimally bad).

  2. Boot from an Ubuntu live CD/DVD or live USB flash drive (as it is not considered safe to edit a physical disk's partition table from within any of the operating systems installed on the physical disk). Select Try Ubuntu rather than Install Ubuntu.

  3. Use GParted, the GNOME Partition Editor, to edit the partition table on the hard disk, removing the Windows system.

    • Start GParted (System > Administration > GParted, or if you're using a live system of Ubuntu 11.10 or later, press the Super, i.e., Windows key, type gparted, and click the search result that appears).
    • Select your Windows partition (it will be of type NTFS and will probably have a pale green border).
    • Delete it (Partition > Delete).
    • Optionally, resize your Ubuntu partition to take up the freed space. You may be able to do this by selecting it (it's of type ext4) and using Partition > Resize/Move. However, if it is contained in an extended partition (a kind of container partition for other partitions) and the Windows partition was not contained in the extended partition, then you may need to expand the extended partition first, and then expand the Ubuntu ext4 partition contained within it.

      While this step is optional, the space that Windows occupied will not be available to your Ubuntu system if you skip it. (However, if you just want to use the space for storage, you could create a new partition for that purpose where your Windows partition used to be, instead of expanding Ubuntu's ext4 partition.)
    • Apply your changes (Edit > Apply All Operations).

  4. Quit GParted and reboot (click the power icon at the upper-right corner of the screen and click Restart or Shut Down). Once you have booted back into the Ubuntu system installed on the hard drive, update your GRUB menu to remove the Windows option, by running sudo update-grub in a Terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T). When you run that command, you might be prompted for your password. As you enter it, you won't see any placeholder characters (like *). That's OK--just type it in and press enter. After you've run that command, Windows should no longer appear as an option to select in the boot menu.

However, unless your Windows partition is seriously damaged or infected with viruses, I wouldn't recommend removing it. Instead, shrink your Windows partition, leaving space for your data plus an extra gigabyte for virtual memory (the versions of GParted that come with all currently supported Ubuntu releases are able to resize NTFS partitions). You never know when you'll need to use an application that only works with Windows.

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Use gparted to remove windows partition then install Ubuntu, if Ubuntu installer ask you what to do, choose remove everything and install Ubuntu. When everything's done, eject the USB and shutdown the installer. Then open your PC up and check everything is fine, if not feel free to ask on the comments right below 😊

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What you want to do (If you have not installed yet) is to install up to the step where there are multiple options for disks. Select remove windows. Otherwise, use GParted to remove the windows partition.

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