Generating new grub table after new installation

Question

On my computer I have the following partitions:

/dev/sda1   *        2048   180410359    90204156    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2       180410368   262330367    40960000    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       262330429   599834969   168752270+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4       599840768   625135615    12647424    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda5       262330431   451089134    94379352   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       451089198   599834969    74372886   83  Linux

sda1 is the Windows Vista partition and is bootable. sda3 is an extended partition containing two Linux partitions: sda5and sda6.

sda5 contains my old Linux installation (Ubuntu 10.04) and sda6 contains my new Linux installation (Ubuntu 12.04). During installation, Ubuntu 12.04 has configured GRUB so that I get all three operating systems in the boot menu, i.e.

Ubuntu 12.04 (/dev/sda6)
Windows Vista (/dev/sda1)
Ubuntu 10.04 (/dev/sda5)

After moving all my files to Ubuntu 12.04, I want to format the Ubuntu 10.04 partition /dev/sda5) and use it to store data.

My question is: can I run GRUB again after I have deleted Ubuntu 10.04 to regenerate the boot menu and remove all the Ubuntu 10.04 entries? What is the name of the tool I have to use, in case there is one?

Answer 1

As @bcbc said delete or format the partition but BEFORE rebooting, run sudo update-grub. If you don't you may end up with a Grub rescue prompt.