0

I wiped my drive (/dev/sda) which contained previous Windows 10 installation by using gdisk in Arch (which is installed on /dev/sdb) and choosing z for zap (wiping GPT) and deleting whole partitions by choosing the o option.

Then I tried a clean installation of Windows 10 on that empty drive (/dev/sda).

However, as you can see on the picture, Windows 10 still somehow magically finds entries of previous Windows 10 installations, even though I wiped my drives entirely.

I read about bcdedit, but where does windows' boot manager get the information from? Can this information somehow be stored on /dev/sdb?

I /dev/sda several times, and still it manages to get the information about previous installations.

enter image description here

2
  • I wonder if it has anything to do with your UEFI. Check whether there are leftover UEFI boot entries as well with efibootmgr.
    – Tom Yan
    Apr 8, 2016 at 23:36
  • I did forget to mention that I also deleted the Windows Bootmanager UEFI entry through UEFI/BIOS interface. efibootmgr does the same thing.
    – zunder
    Apr 8, 2016 at 23:46

1 Answer 1

0

I'm not all that familiar with the Windows boot manager; however, your description makes it sound as if it's reading data from the EFI's boot manager store in NVRAM. You can access this boot list in a number of ways, including:

  • bcdedit in Windows -- I'm unfamiliar with the details of this approach, beyond adding new entries.
  • EasyUEFI in Windows -- This third-party tool presents a GUI menu in which you can add, delete, and re-order boot entries. It's likely to be the easiest one for you to use and experiment.
  • efibootmgr in Linux -- This tool does what EasyUEFI does, but in a text-mode way from Linux. Since you mentioned Arch Linux, check the Arch wiki entry on efibootmgr for details.
  • bcfg in an EFI shell -- If you run an EFI shell (v2, not the older v1), the bcfg command can be useful. The Arch wiki also has information on this command.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .