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Edit: This is not a duplicate of the marked issue above. The marked issue is about Win7 being installed and the PC directly booting to Windows... This is about nothing booting (i.e. Ubuntu) at all after deleting the Windows partition...

So I had Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18 parallely installed. Yesterday my Ubuntu ran out of memory on my hard drive - as I have stopped using Windows in the past couple of months I decided to simply delete it and make more space for Ubuntu. I followed a well-rated Tutorial on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkh-2tYt1g4) where I just had to delete the Windows Bootloader and Windows partition in GParted. After that I'd just stretch out my Ubuntu Partition over the now free space.This is what my partition looks like now.
My problem now: Ubuntu won't boot after I restarted my PC! It goes to black screen and then straight to BIOS. I opened Ubuntu live-version from an USB and ran bootinfoscript (sdb is my USB-drive)
As you can see for my Ubuntu partition, Boot sector type and Boot sector info are empty, so I must have messed something up...
Did I delete the Ubuntu GRUB by accident? Can I fix this problem without losing my Ubuntu data?
I am fairly inexperienced with Ubuntu, so please excuse any inaccuracies on my side.

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  • No it's not. These are different issues...
    – Denny
    May 12, 2019 at 10:02
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    It might be that the issue in the suggested duplicate is not similar to yours, but the solution is. You have to update grub because partition layout has changed. Please follow the procedure in the accepted answer in the link suggested by @karel.
    – Soren A
    May 12, 2019 at 10:22
  • I understand, thanks! I will try it out and report back!
    – Denny
    May 12, 2019 at 10:23
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    The video you watched was for the old BIOS/MBR configuration that most Windows 7 systems used. Microsoft has required vendors to install in UEFI with gpt partitioning since 2012 and release of Windows 8. As you found an ESP - efi system partition is required for UEFI boot. And in dual booting Windows & Ubuntu/grub share one ESP.
    – oldfred
    May 12, 2019 at 13:55

1 Answer 1

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The supposed duplicate answer did not work.
This is how I finally solved this issue after hours of research, hope this will help someone:
1. Boot Ubuntu Live Version from USB
2. In gparted, create a new 200 MiB partition (FAT-32)
3. Move it to the very front (left) of the hard-drive.
4. Right click the new partition and flag it as esp and boot.
IT WILL LOOK LIKE THIS
5. Download and run GRUB2 repair: https://www.howtogeek.com/114884/how-to-repair-grub2-when-ubuntu-wont-boot/
6. Click Recommended Repair - if an error comes - please make sure steps 1-4 have been done correctly and applied with the green tick-mark at the very top in gparted
7. Just execute the instruction (copy-paste like 5 lines into the terminal)
8. The program will say it is done and spit out an URL. just save/write down the URL in case there are any problems.
9. You can now reboot and your Ubuntu should work, without any data loss!

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  • Indeed. You had to recreate the ESP that you wrongly deleted thinking it was the "Windows Bootloader". I haven't watched the video but I bet it isn't applicable to UEFI systems. Deleting the ESP was you one and only mistake.
    – user880592
    May 12, 2019 at 17:08
  • THANK YOU, this was exactly the solution I needed in order to address a similar issue. After many hours and many SO threads, I'm so thankful for this one. My particular problem was that I had dual booted linux with windows many years ago and just kept those drives over time. I think deleting my windows boot partition also deleted any trace of boot info that existed for ubuntu. This got me right back into my system! A thousand thank yous! Dec 16, 2022 at 2:36

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