Delete EFI partition on external drive.

Anonymous
2024-06-18T13:31:49+00:00

I've been having problems regarding SSD cloning. Macrium have been very helpful. It appears that I'm booting from the 2 installed internal hard drives (!?!).

It was working OK for ages but obviously something subsequently has happened.

It was recommended I clone to an external drive.

Fortunately I had a another SDD that I could use. I reformatted this and connected externally . Checked with file folder that it could be read and was empty. All good.

Used Macrium to clone but was concerned that if supposedly booting form 2 internal drives, what am I copying, and would it work?

It didn't!

Both drives had 3 partitions; An EFI System partition (100MB), Windows 11 Home partition (465 GB) and a Recovery Partition ((610MB)

To cut long story short, the external drive now consists of 2 partitions, The EFI partition and an unallocated partition.

The external SDD is no accessible !!. I get the message "You currently don't have permission to access this folder" and continuing, "You have been denied access to this folder" " to gain access to this folder you will have to use the security tab"

Don't understand what to do next.

Using Disk Management and right clicking on greyed out EFI partition gives a greyed out window

Can anyone help in getting this 'external' drive accessible again ?

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Recovery and backup

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-06-21T14:19:22+00:00

    Magic! Disc cleaned, initialised and volume created. Now back in operation. Many thanks for your support.

    Now to see what happens when I try and image C:/ to this external drive,

    Concerned that have to have both internal (C:/ and D:/ - original image) drives for system to successfully boot.

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  2. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-19T16:25:30+00:00

    Alternatively, we can manually delete the 16 MB MSR partition and create a contiguous unallocated space.

    Run:

    diskpart
    select disk 2
    list partition
    

    Share the output.

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  3. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-19T16:14:58+00:00

    If closing and reopening Disk Management doesn't help, you can try the diskpart clean command to merge those two unallocated spaces on Disk 2.

    Important: When running the clean command, take extra care when inputting the disk number. It wipes the chosen disk entirely.

    https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/85819-erase...

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  5. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-19T02:51:13+00:00

    It can't be both. You boot from one disk only.

    Disk 1's EFI partition is the one being used now.

    I see three 465 GB disks and three EFI partitions.

    Can you post a full screenshot of Disk Management?

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