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michael351
April 3rd, 2020, 08:40 PM
Over the years I routinely upgrade/update my Ubuntu/Windows installation. Lately I have noticed an accumulation of kernals and related that I would like to remove (see below). I only want to keep Ubuntu and win10. What is a safe way to clean the rest of this up?


Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-45-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-45-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-42-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-42-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-40-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-40-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-91-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-91-generic
Found Windows Recovery Environment on /dev/sda1
Found Windows 10 on /dev/sda2
Found Windows 7 on /dev/sda3
Found Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS - KODIbuntu (14.04) on /dev/sda6
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-45-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-45-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-42-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-42-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-40-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.3.0-40-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-91-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-91-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found Windows Recovery Environment on /dev/sda1
Found Windows 10 on /dev/sda2
Found Windows 7 on /dev/sda3
Found Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS - KODIbuntu (14.04) on /dev/sda6
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found Windows Recovery Environment on /dev/sda1
Found Windows 10 on /dev/sda2
Found Windows 7 on /dev/sda3
Found Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS - KODIbuntu (14.04) on /dev/sda6
SeijiSensei
April 3rd, 2020, 08:47 PM
sudo apt remove linux*4.* linux*5.3.0-40*
TheFu
April 3rd, 2020, 11:55 PM
Don't think apt deals with globbing. Apt-get does, however.
On 16.04 and later, using

sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt autoclean
should remove older kernels automatically. Think it keeps 2 or 3 kernels.
Impavidus
April 4th, 2020, 10:32 AM
Not autoclean, but autoremove:
sudo apt autoremove --purge
autoclean will remove old packages from cache (which is useful too).

I see a lot of duplicates in the list you posted. Strange, unless something went wrong when you pasted it on the forum. update-grub will simply list all installed systems it detects. The package manager can remove old kernels in Ubuntu, but if you want to get rid of Windows 7 on sda3 and the 14.04 system on sda6, you have to delete those OSs.
michael351
April 4th, 2020, 02:30 PM
Is there a way to remove the older windows OS (win 7)?
TheFu
April 4th, 2020, 02:50 PM
impavidus is correct. autoremove. It was late when I posted. Sorry.


sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt autoremove && sudo apt autoclean

Are my weekly patching commands. About once a month, I'll swap sudo apt upgrade for sudo apt dist-upgrade
Many of my systems use LVM which forces a separate, small, /boot/ partition. Letting /boot/ get full causes some bad things to happen which are best proactively avoided.

To remove Windows, just format the partitions it uses. Be certain to backup any data you might want to keep first.
oldfred
April 4th, 2020, 03:44 PM
New installs of Windows often use an existing install's boot partition for its boot files & then adds older install to BCD.
Check which Windows partition has boot files.
Windows uses boot flag to know which partition to boot from. Grub looks for boot files.

Windows BIOS Boot files:
WinXP
/boot.ini /ntldr /NTDETECT.COM
Vista/7/8/10 BIOS (with 7, 8 or 10 the first two files are usually in a separate 100MB boot partition)
/bootmgr /Boot/BCD /Windows/System32/winload.exe
michael351
April 4th, 2020, 09:12 PM
A bunch is now cleaned up - thanks. This is what's left:

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2048 35653631 35651584 17G 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda2 * 35653632 35858431 204800 100M 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 35858432 202442555 166584124 79.4G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4 202442750 488396799 285954050 136.4G f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 276912468 380232780 103320313 49.3G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6 380233728 483876863 103643136 49.4G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 483887104 488396799 4509696 2.2G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 202442752 276912127 74469376 35.5G 83 Linux


Not sure which one is my Ubuntu system (vs. old Ubuntu) or which is Win10. (/dev/sdb is my data disk and for backups - so I should be able to recover)