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
    2024-07-17T16:10:28+00:00

    The drive letter assignment can change when you're in WinRE.

    Please run:

    mountvol y: /s

    diskpart

    list disk

    sel dis 0

    detail disk

    list part

    sel dis 1

    list part

    list vol

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-07-17T15:55:53+00:00

    Hi Remesh,

    This was result ?

    D:\ !!!!!?????

    This is reality:-

    C:\ is MSI and F:\ is USB.. Where did D:\ come from ??? and only one installation found ??

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  4. Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-07-17T15:17:23+00:00

    //Boot Manager only showing one boot device.//

    With the external drive connected, please try bootrec /rebuildbcd from WinRE. It should add the external drive to the BCD/boot menu. Reboot the system to test if the boot options are working.

    Once done, clone the EFI (from MSI → Samsung) so that both disks have identical configurations.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-07-17T15:06:37+00:00

    Hi Remesh,

    Subsequent to my ***EDIT *** yesterday, I can confirm-

    boot order#1 is "UEFI USB hard Drive".

    boot order#2 is "UEFI Hard Drive: Windows Boot Manager"

    For some reason, whilst I've taken a snip of BIOS to upload to you as confirmation, for some reason they will not upload (?)

    Connected external drive and rebooted successfully. Assume it has booted from USB hard drive but I can't confirm this. the only option I see is to remove the internal MSI and reboot. Do you have any thoughts. ???

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