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 Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-21T14:38:37+00:00

    Thanks for the update.

    You can make Disk 0 bootable. That should be an easy task.

    Please open an admin Command Prompt, and run:

    diskpart
select disk 0
list part

    Post the screenshot here.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-06-22T09:21:33+00:00

    Hi Ramesh,

    As requested:-

    Image

    Also added Disk Management profile:-

    Can you explain why 'diskpart' shows 4 partitions and 'disk management' only 3 ?? Partition 2 (I assume) appears "hidden"

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  3. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-22T09:26:00+00:00

    Assuming you haven't closed the Command window yet.

    Please run:

    select partition 1
assign letter=Y
exit
bcdboot C:\Windows /s Y: /f UEFI
diskpart
select volume Y
remove
exit

    Post screenshot.

    That should make the Drive 0 bootable.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-06-22T10:02:14+00:00

    As requested:-

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  5. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-22T10:03:26+00:00

    It ran fine. Please see if you can boot from disk 0 (or disconnect disk 1 to test). The boot option needs to be changed in the UEFI.

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