You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Deleted "Boot Camp" partition. Still in startup options.

A few days ago, I ran windows 10 on boot camp assistant on my old mac. I deleted the partition of boot camp but it's still on the startup options. I deleted Macintosh HD, reinstalled MacOS, and gave my old mac to my brother. However, the boot camp is still in the startup options. How do I remove this?

Posted on Nov 27, 2024 9:38 PM

Reply
1 reply

Nov 29, 2024 9:10 PM in response to Mister_Armor

You needed to erase the whole physical drive in order to create a new partition table so that it recreates the hidden ESP (aka EFI) partition. You can try mounting the hidden EFI partition and deleting the "windows" folder that is on it. Usually the hidden EFI partition is "disk0s1", so within the Terminal app you will need to use the following command to mount the hidden EFI partition:

diskutil  mount  disk0s1


If this doesn't automatically open the Finder window to access it, then you will need to open a Finder window and navigate to "/Volumes/EFI". Delete the "windows" folder, then eject the volume. You should no longer see Windows as a startup option.


FYI, in order to remove Windows Bootcamp properly, you need to use the Bootcamp Assistant app to remove Windows which would delete the Windows partition & merge it back into your macOS volume as well as deleting the hidden boot items.


Deleted "Boot Camp" partition. Still in startup options.

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.