I once cancelled a CachyOS installation immediately after it had erased my drive. Since then, I have installed several other distributions, but a nonworking CachyOS entry still appears in my firmware's F12 boot menu. Removing it with efibootmgr, and later with a Windows UEFI utility, makes it disappear temporarily, but it returns the next time the computer boots. The entry reportedly points to something like EFIBootbootx64.efi followed by a string of numbers, while the only visible EFI file on my current system is /boot/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi. How can I locate whatever is recreating this entry and remove it permanently?
2 Answers
Check the EFI System Partition directly rather than relying only on lsblk or fdisk. Mount the ESP, usually at /boot/efi or /boot, and inspect it with something like `find /boot/efi/EFI -type f` or `find /boot/EFI -type f`. Old bootloader directories can remain there even when the operating system is gone. Remove only the directory that belongs to the abandoned installation, not the files used by your current bootloader.
It may not be a normal persistent boot entry at all. Some firmware automatically creates a boot option when it finds an EFI executable at the fallback location `EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI`, or it may be restoring entries from its own saved settings. First delete the NVRAM entry with efibootmgr, then inspect every disk’s EFI System Partition and remove any leftover CachyOS loader directory. Also check the firmware setup for options such as restoring default boot entries or automatically adding detected bootloaders.
If the entry comes back even after the matching EFI files are gone, clear the old firmware entry again and check whether another drive or removable device contains an EFI partition. Firmware can scan all attached disks, not just the partition mounted by your current Linux installation.
The path shown by efibootmgr is a firmware NVRAM path, so it does not necessarily correspond to a normal Linux filesystem path until the correct EFI partition is mounted. Use `efibootmgr -v` to see the complete entry and verify which disk and partition it references.