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. Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-07-23T13:29:08+00:00

    Great, glad it's all sorted. 👍

    It's a mystery why the system couldn't find the Samsung drive when tried to boot from it.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-07-23T13:22:32+00:00

    OK thanks

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-07-23T13:18:35+00:00

    *** ALL FIXED ***

    Back to how it used to be. Boot "Windows 11 Home" from MSI and "Windows 11 Home Image" from internally connected Seagate EVO.

    I fixed as follow:-

    As system booted with internally connected Seagate SSHD, I connected this as USB drive, reconnected internally the Samsung and cloned Seagate to Samsung.

    Very, very grateful for all your time you spent supporting me on this. I've learnt a lot. Thanks

    Even though BIOS boot order has USB hard drive as #1, this has not (never) worked. The reason for this is not known. That's a problem/fix for another day. I'm happy that I have a working clone.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-07-22T20:09:56+00:00

    No. It's the one currently selected.

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