Delete EFI partition on external drive.

Anonymous

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 ?

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107 answers

Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2024-07-18T14:34:41+00:00

Please run:

reagentc /enable

reagentc /info
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Anonymous

2024-07-18T14:33:24+00:00

Many thanks for commands.

FYI: My access to WinRE has been via Settings>System>Recovery>Advanced Start-up>Restart. I then access command prompt via advanced options. For some reason I no longer have access to the command prompt (!?!). Only Advanced Settings are now "Start-up Settings" and "UEFI Firmware Settings". This has only happened since I ran your previous set of commands (xcopy etc) ??. Can I perform operations via Command prompt as Administrator ???
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Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2024-07-18T14:00:38+00:00
The following commands delete the EFI partition on the external SSD.

Run:
```
diskpart

sel disk 1

sel part 1

del par override

sel disk 0

sel part 1

set id=c12a7328-f81f-11d2-ba4b-00a0c93ec93b
gpt attributes=0X8000000000000000
list vol
exit
```
Reboot the system.

Re-enter WinRE, and run;
```
bootrec /rebuildbcd
```
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Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2024-07-18T13:46:57+00:00

Delete the EFI partition on the external drive using diskpart.

Run the rebuildbcd command again to see if it works fine.
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Anonymous

2024-07-18T13:35:39+00:00

Did as you requested paying particular attention to each command line to ensure no mistakes.

Answered "Yes" when asked to "Proceed with format (Y/N)"

All boot files stated as successfully created.

On rebuildbcd, successfully scanned windows installations and "Total identified Windows installations: 1"

When asked to add installation to boot list I answered "y" for yes. The response was "the system cannot find the path specified"

On system reboot, no boot manager displayed; goes straight to windows desktop.
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