How do I uninstall GRUB?
- by ændrük
A hard drive that I use only for data storage still has GRUB from past Ubuntu installations.
How can I remove GRUB from it without harming the rest of the drive's data?
Background
I occasionally move the data drive between computers with various boot order configurations, so I would like it to be non-bootable in order to avoid having to accommodate it in each computer's BIOS settings.
When I power on a computer while only the data drive is attached, the following appears:
error: no such device: fdf38dd4-9e9d-479d-b830-2a6989958503.
grub rescue>
I can confirm from old backups of /etc/fstab that this was the UUID of a root partition that I recently reformatted and which no longer exists. Here's the the data drive's partition table and raw master boot record.
Please note that I'm not interested in workarounds that don't answer my primary question. I can think of several ways to work around this issue, but it bothers me on principle that I don't know how to directly resolve it. Every installation procedure should have a counterpart uninstallation procedure.
