Remove GRUB from an external USB drive

by Tim Dupree at 10:31 pm on April 4th, 2010 | 2 comments

Need to remove the GRUB boot loader from an external usb drive connected to a Windows machine? This is how I did it.

I had a hard drive that was set up to dual boot Linux and Windows XP. The windows XP install had ceased working for some reason so I decided to wipe the drive and do a clean install.  Since this was an old laptop of mine that my father-in-law was using, I figured I would also wipe the linux partition, that I had played with long ago, and get rid of the dual boot option.

I removed the drive from the laptop, and hooked it up using a simple SATA/IDE to USB cable.  My main desktop is running windows 7 and I just used the built in “Disk Management” app to delete all of the partitions on the laptop hard drive and reformat the drive.  Unfortunately this did not remove the GRUB boot loader or fix the Master Boot Record. When I put the newly formatted drive in the laptop and booted, GRUB would appear and give me ERROR 21.

Finally to remove the GRUB boot loader from the drive and fix the MBR (Master Boot Record), I had to install a program called Partition Wizard.  It turns out the Home Edition is free and it works great for partitioning, formatting, and wiping hard drives. The best part, it can rewrite and fix the MBR on hard drives, even external hard drives connected via usb. Problem solved, and now I have a clean and tidy hard drive to install a fresh OS on.

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2 Responses to “Remove GRUB from an external USB drive”

  1. Hey, I had a problem with ubuntu and I, stupidly, erased the ubuntu partition without correctly uninstalling, the point is I ended up with windows 7 and Grub does not let me boot into windows, ive tried to boot from everything external but it doesn’t work, I took the HD out and got a sata/ide to usb cable but i dont know if there’s a way to erase the grub without uninstalling windows, if ther is, Could you explain me?
    Thanks for reading, nice webpage you got here!

    1. Carlos Monge,  October 16th, 2011 at 3:38 pm

  2. [...] How I missed this thread is beyond me, man I am scattered these days… I need to get back to my routine. Remove GRUB from an external USB drive | Tim Dupree – tdupree.com [...]

    2. Best way to remove grub from external hard drive? - PCMech Forums,  January 24th, 2012 at 8:41 am

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