Instead of trying every boot device listed, Is it possible to clean this list of the non-working duplicates? Or, edit their meaningless descriptions to identify them?
Last edited by ineuw; 10 Jun 2019 at 17:51.
Which is your primary BOOT disk/storage device ? How many OSes were/are installed on it ?
UEFI has nasty habit of keeping BOOT entries even when that particular OS is not active any more.
I have two 120GB SSD's .
The first SSD is for Windows 10 with a separate partition for the pagefile.sys (plus the hidden UEFI and an empty 16MB reserved partition created by Windows installation)
The second SSD is dedicated to Linux Mint 19.1 and a separate swap partition
Grub is sharing the EFI partiton with Windows, and boots from the Linux root. (/)
There is no data on either drive.
But you did multiple installs of Linux and windows which are not active any more. As there's no way to uninstall a particular OS, those entries made at time of their installation are left where they were. Best way to avoid that is to install a particular OS with other active disks disconnected so it makes and uses own EFI partition.
Rebuilding of UEFI partition on primary drive may get rid of all extra entries.
Access Denied
Thanks for the explanation and the link. It makes everything perfectly clear. Started with a single drive and kept adding over time, so boot OS's were used on all drives. Can this be corrected by backing up the data drives to an external drive and reformat them?
Access is denied for bootrec /fixboot, so I had to rebuild it with chkdsk and it made no difference. Read up and tried all possible methods, of which there are a lot of articles on the web - all offering the same solution. Also, this is a fresh install of Windows 10 done four days ago. I need an external drive to move the data and reformat the two Seagate drives data drives.
Those items you are seeing aren't coming from the EFI system partition - they are stored in NVRAM. When you install Windows (or grub) it adds a record telling the firmware the path to the bootloader. Even if you delete the bootloader from ESP these entries will remain.
You can delete, re-order them using Linux with efibootmgr command or from EFI shell with bcfg command - see here for some details linux - How to rename a UEFI boot entry? - Super User
From Windows you can use EasyUEFI - it used to be free but it seems not any more.
You can get a trial version here Manage EFI/UEFI boot options & Manage EFI System Partitions & Fix EFI/UEFI boot issues the easy way!. This works perfectly fine for a limited time.
It probably is a good idea to prune them - my laptop paused for 30s on boot looking for a non-existent bootloader until I deleted it. Just don't delete the ones you are currently using or you'll have to re-add them.
I agree with lx07 but have you checked your BIOS/UEFI to see if it has the options you need built into it?
My BIOS/UEFI does have the necessary options - I can add / delete boot device entries as well as move them up/down the sequence.
Denis
My BIOS picks up every bootable disk/partition and displays it as UEFI or CSM bootable disk depending on their configuration. As all of them with exception of M.2 SSD are in removable trays, when I remove one of them it doesn't list it in bootable device list any more. Only one that persist in that list is SSD with Mint on it which was installed with that M.2 drive active even with that Mint SSD taken out. That's clearly because the said Mint disk is remembered in M.2's EFI partition.
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