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
    2024-07-18T15:08:14+00:00

    You should be able to boot into WinRE and run those commands to rebuild the BCD.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-07-18T15:43:07+00:00

    Delete partition

    Image

    RebuildBCD

    Image

    Still the same? No addition to Boot list. On reboot, no boot manager displayed and go straight to desktop ??

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  3. Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-07-18T16:05:24+00:00

    That's really weird. You may try this:

    • mountvol y: /s
    • cd /d y:\EFI\Microsoft\boot
    • attrib -s -h -r BCD
    • ren BCD BCD.old
    • bootrec /rebuildbcd

    If you get the same error, please undo the above steps by running:

    • cd /d y:\EFI\Microsoft\boot
    • del bcd /a
    • ren BCD.old BCD

    Run;

    • bcdboot D:\Windows

    (edited)

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  4. Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-07-18T16:31:34+00:00

    I've edited my previous post.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-07-20T08:35:32+00:00

    Yes definitely weird.

    I note from your commands that the change directory command is to disk d: The external USB connected drive on my PC is shown as f:. Should I change commands to show this ? This confirmed by Disk Management.

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