Removing entries from UEFI menu with efibootmgr

Question

I would like to find out how to remove OSes (distros) from UEFI boot menu when you have entries with letters and asterisks.

I'd try it myself before asking but I'm not too techy and fixing the mess I might cause by doing something that I don't understand might take me ages.

1. Let's say I want to get rid of Boot000E* which is opensuse, would I type sudo efibootmgr -b E* -B?

2. Why are there some letters (not numbers) and

3. What do asterisks * mean there?

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$ sudo efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0008
Timeout: 2 seconds
BootOrder: 0008,0010,000C,0009,0006,000F,000E,000D,0007,000B
Boot0000  BIOS Setup       
Boot0001  Boot Menu
Boot0002  Diagnostic Screen
Boot0003  Recovery and Utility
Boot0004  Diagnostic Program
Boot0005  Diagnostic Progrogram ROM
Boot0006* Floppy Disk Drive:
Boot0007* Drive0 HDD:
Boot0008* USB HDD:
Boot0009* USB CD/DVD:
Boot000A* Erase Disk
Boot000B* Windows Boot Manager
Boot000C* ubuntu
Boot000D* Fedora
Boot000E* opensuse
Boot000F* opensuse-secureboot
Boot0010* mageia

Answer 1

You should not include the asterisk when using boot numbers in an efibootmgr command. An asterisk simply identifies a boot entry that's active, vs. one that's inactive. The man page for efibootmgr isn't exactly clear about what that means, but my guess is that an inactive entry won't be booted even if it appears in the BootOrder list. Other than that, your command is correct; you'd type sudo efibootmgr -b E -B to remove the Boot000E entry.

In fact, the boot numbers are all numbers -- they're just hexadecimal numbers (base 16, hence digits 0 to F rather than 0 to 9). See the Wikipedia article on hexadecimal if you're unfamiliar with it.

Answer 2

I have also been looking to these solution to remove fedora entry from the EFI menu but somehow the EFI entry just refused to deleted by any of the method. So what i tried was the following.

Started command prompt as administrator and then mount the EFI partition using the command, mountvol z: /S (z: is the name of the drive that you want your EFI to take name). Then delete the folder named z:\EFI\fedora from the partition using the del command. This is prevent loading the boot entry every time you restart your machine. Now go to the command prompt and remove the boot entry for fedora as given in the post http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721886(v=ws.10).aspx. Here all it asks you is to find the identifier corresponding to fedora and removing it. You should now be able to remove the invalid boot entry.

Hope it helps!