First, you wrote:
I do not have enough portable storage for backup
FIX THIS PROBLEM IMMEDIATELY!!!!!
I frequently see problems on this and other sites caused by people who have inadequate backups. Because of accidents or hardware failures, they lose all their personal data.
That out of the way, your computer uses EFI firmware, not BIOS. One of your repair attempts used bootrec.exe /fixmbr
, but that works only on BIOS-based computers. Under EFI, the boot process involves:
- An entry in NVRAM tells the computer what boot loader (stored on the EFI System Partition, or ESP) to launch. In fact, a list of boot options is stored; each one is tried in turn until one succeeds.
- Control passes to the boot loader specified by the NVRAM. This boot loader may do any number of things, but ultimately....
- The boot loader loads an OS kernel.
Your problem is caused by the fact that GRUB 2 (the usual Linux boot loader) is often configured to rely on files stored on the Linux filesystem. Thus, when you deleted the Linux partition, the EFI continued to launch GRUB 2 (which was stored on the ESP), but GRUB 2 was unable to read its configuration file, and you got the emergency grub>
prompt. This is a design flaw in GRUB 2, or at least in the way it's often configured -- it really should not be depending upon configuration files stored anywhere but on the ESP.
There are two solutions to this problem:
- Delete GRUB -- If you delete the GRUB files from the ESP, the firmware will move on to the next item in the boot list. To do this, you must mount the ESP in an OS (or launch an EFI shell) and delete the files, which are normally stored in a directory like
EFI/ubuntu
orEFI/fedora
(depending on the distribution you installed). The ESP is easy to spot with most partitioning tools, since it's a FAT partition early on the disk. Sometimes it's marked as an "EFI System Partition" or something similar. Your first screen shot shows it, in fact -- it's your second partition. In Windows, you can mount it with the/S
option tomountvol
, as inmountvol /S E:
to mount it asE:
. In Linux, it mounts like any other partition, with themount
command. - Re-organize your boot order -- This can be done with
efibootmgr
in Linux orbcdedit
in Windows; however, in Windows the EasyUEFI utility presents an easier and more flexible GUI way to control the boot order. Whatever tool you use, delete GRUB 2 from the boot order, or at least move it below the Windows boot loader in priority. To useefibootmgr
, first type it alone to see what boot options exist; then use-b
and-B
to delete one, as inefibootmgr -b 5 -B
to delete theBoot0005
entry; or use-o
to rearrange the boot order, as inefibootmgr -o 2,5,3
to have the system tryBoot0002
first, thenBoot0005
, thenBoot0003
.