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. Anonymous
    2024-06-22T10:18:45+00:00

    Just rebooted system. All OK.

    I'll disconnect disk 1 and restart. I'll advise outcome.

    Thanks for all your help to date. Much appreciated.

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  2. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-22T13:00:48+00:00

    Hi majestic100,

    Ok, let me know how it goes.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-06-22T13:20:11+00:00

    Hi Remesh,

    disconnected drive but failed to boot on restart ! ?

    Took a long hard look at PC build. Yes, the PC is equipped as requested with 2 SSD's. One is fixed and connected directly to the mother board and is a 500GB MSI Spatium M390; first PC I've had with this type of SSD. The other, which has been added to the build and removable, is what I call a standard 2.5 inch SSD and is a 500GB Samsung.

    I would of thought that disc 0 would be the MSI Spatium and disc 1 the Samsung

    I'm now thinking, rightly or wrongly, that disc 0 is the Samsung and disk 1 the MSI Spatium

    Hence on successful boot, using the Samsung (disk 1 or C:)

    Appreciate your view. Should the diskpart commands be on selecting disc 1 not 0 ?? I'm confused at what's happening

    Image

    I'd like the PC to boot from the fixed MSI SSD

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  4. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,435 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-06-22T13:24:32+00:00

    Hi majestic100,

    Windows is installed on Disk 0 and so we copied the boot files to the EFI partition on Disk 0.

    Right-click on Disk 0 and click Properties. It tells the model number of that disk.

    Here's a screenshot:

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-06-22T13:47:24+00:00

    Thanks.

    Booting from the Samsung not MSI;-

    Disc 0 properties are

    Disc 1 properties

    Like to boot from disc 1 (MSI) so I can remove disc 0 (Samsung) and use as external image drive.

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