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Some background

I originally dualbooted with linux, and to remove it, I deleted the partition, and in order for me to get rid of the grub thing, I booted with a recovery disk and tried all of the BOOTREC commands, but the grub launcher would not go away. Then I came to another tutorial that said to do delete the partition, but this time:

DISKPART --> LIST DISK --> SELECT DISK 0 (my 1TB disk) --> LIST PARTITION

and then SELECT PARTITION _, where _ = 1,2,3,4 or 5. I originally tried partition 3 which was my C drive, and then wrote ACTIVE, but then I got this error:

The selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk

I tried this for all of the disks but I got the same error. What am I doing wrong?


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It looks like your setup uses GPT, not MBR. You tried to set the partition as active but this status is specific to MBR.

There is, however, a Legacy BIOS bootable flag in GPT equivalent to the active flag in MBR. Since diskpart complains your disk is not an MBR disk, I guess the tool doesn't care for the legacy flag.

But even if it did, I doubt it would do you something good. Your efforts and the tutorial you have found seem to address MBR-related booting process, where the bootloader stages are (generally) in MBR, in active partition VBR, then in some file eventually.

In your case there's an EFI system partition (ESP).

An ESP contains the boot loaders or kernel images for all installed operating systems (which are contained in other partitions), device driver files for hardware devices present in a computer and used by the firmware at boot time, system utility programs that are intended to be run before an operating system is booted, and data files such as error logs.

The bootrec commands you mentioned also deal with MBR. Your UEFI doesn't need any bootcode in MBR, it goes straight to ESP. This explains why your GRUB survived what you did.


The general conclusion is you should follow a tutorial that covers the UEFI+ESP case. I think these links may be a good start:

I have hardly any experience with ESPs, so do your own broader research before you proceed.

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