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
    2024-06-22T21:35:03+00:00

    My guess is that you could have "Windows 11 Home Image (D:)" boot immediately by running

    bcdboot D:\Windows

    and then could remove Disk 0.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-06-22T18:10:24+00:00

    sorry for any confusion.

    Your last reply stated "that Disk 0 is the one which is in use currently, (although the boot files in Disk 1 are being used.)"

    The disk I want to detach is disk 0 (Samsung EVO)

    Therefore looking for Disc 1 (MSI M390) to have boot files (which it has) AND the files that are currently in use i.e. those of disk 0

    From my understanding it would mean copying the 'windows 11 home' partition from disc 0 to the windows 11 image (basic data partition) of disc 1.

    Trust that is correct and understandable

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  3. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-22T17:06:37+00:00

    Hi majestic100,

    Which disk do you want to detach? In your last response, you stated you wanted to detach disk 0.

    If you want to boot from disk 0, detach disk 1 or change the boot order in UEFI to boot from disk 0 (Samsung). We've already copied the boot files to the EFI partition on disk 0, so it should be bootable.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-06-22T17:02:54+00:00

    Hi Remesh,

    Bit late in replying as mulling over what I should or could do.

    Noting that Disk 0 is the one which is in use currently, although the boot files in Disk 1 are being used, I ideally would like to totally use disc 0 including boot files

    Thanks for your input on how I can achieve this.

    My dilemma is that the the disk 1 image is significantly out of date compared to the current use disk 0.

    Is it possible to for boot files of disc 0 to be used ?? Would that partition need to be created ??

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  5. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-22T14:02:47+00:00

    Note that Disk 0 is the one which is in use currently, (although the boot files in Disk 1 are being used.)

    If you want to boot from Disk 1 (assuming it's a clone of Disk 0)

    1. Create a Windows 11 USB Setup disk.
    2. Detach Disk 0 (Samsung)
    3. Boot from the USB setup disk and access Recovery Environment by pressing Shift + F10 at the setup screen.
    4. Run: diskpart list disk select disk 0 list part list vol

    Take a photo of the screen and post the screenshot here.

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