Marco van Hilst's questions

Once upon a time (2008 - ????) Ubuntu had a Hall of Fame page (then located at http://hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com) in which it would give credits to contributors such as developers who patched a bug in the One Hundred Papercuts project or the top weekly contributors right here on Ask Ubuntu. You can see Jono Bacon's blog post about it here.

Some time since the last contribution to its Launchpad repository in 2011 and now it was removed from the website completely (DNS record for hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com removed). Extensive Googling has yielded no answers in any form. The the last snapshot of the site by web.archive.org reveals no clues, either (it looks perfectly normal, and then there are no more snapshots).

So I'm curious- why was it removed?

This all started when I went to install Ubuntu on a partition on my external HDD. In the Ubuntu LiveUSB's installer, the configuration was to create an ext4 partition in empty space on the external HDD (/dev/sdc3) and write the bootloader to /dev/sdc. The install completed nicely and I was able to boot fine into the new Ubuntu partition- with one catch.

Upon restarting, I had been greeted with a complaint from Secure Boot (Secure Boot Violation - Invalid signature), which was odd, given that I had not told the installer to touch the original bootloader (or anything, for that matter) on /dev/sda. I got prompted with GRUB after dismissing the complaint, also strange seeing as I had not gotten to the point where I could choose the boot order. I rebooted without the external HDD to verify that it was on the main drive and not the external one, at which point GRUB gave me a terminal rather than a menu. Typing 'exit' brought me back into Windows 8.

I've attempted to erase GRUB by booting into Windows in command prompt mode and using bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot, but it had no effect and GRUB remains.

So my questions are:

1. Why did Ubuntu's installer decide to write GRUB to both /dev/sda and /dev/sdc when I specified /dev/sdc as the bootloader partition and /dev/sdc3 as the Ubuntu install partition?
2. How can I get rid of GRUB with something other than Windows in recovery mode?