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
    2024-07-21T13:55:57+00:00

    If you understand what's happening/happened in the following dialogue I'd much appreciate it if you could explain it to me !!

    Prior to your last response I’d been using a Seagate SSD as USB connected device.  This saved me from unscrewing Samsung from within PC case.  Unfortunately, the Seagate physical drive is fixed within a case which cannot be taken apart. What to do ?

    Found another drive which could be removed from its case, formatted and installed this using internal connections

    Ran Macrium Reflect and cloned C:\ to D:\ successfully.

    Re-installed EasyBCD2.4.0.237 and added D:\

    Rebooted to C:\ and deleted word documents I'd saved to desktop.   Also added a word document  (extra precaution) entitled “This is the not the Image drive” to the desktop

    Rebooted to D:\ (Image). SUCCESS !!!!; deleted word documents on C:\ show up on D:. and added “This is the not the Image drive” not shown.  Hurrah; now have a working clone image

    Problem/Issue: Took a long time to boot the image to desktop. This may be because the drive used is a Seagate hybrid (SSHD).

    No worries; I restored connections to original internal Samsung SSD.

    Reboot to D:\ but failed

    Ran Macrium Reflect, deleted all D:\ partitions and cloned C:\ to D:\ successfully.

    Reboot to C:\ OK

    Reboot to D:\ failed with error code 0xC000000e; windows\system32\winload.efi

    Totally weird !!!!

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  2. Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-07-20T15:02:26+00:00

    Sorry, I meant the Samsung disk. Connect it as an internal drive. Boot from the MSI disk as usual, and rerun the bcdboot command (bcdboot f:\windows) from Windows admin Command Prompt to add the dual boot entry. BTW, your existing BCD is backed up to c:\bcd.bak2.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-07-20T14:49:07+00:00

    Sorry, totally confused now.

    The M2 disk (MSI M390) has been connected to the motherboard for sometime

    File folder:-

    It's been connected when following performed

    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

    And since it didn't work

    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

    Have we come to the end of the line? and I'm not going to be able to boot from and external USB SSD on this PC ?? If so, many thanks for all your efforts. I certainly leant a lot.

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  4. Ramesh 181.2K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-07-20T13:22:25+00:00

    The BCDBoot command adds D:\Windows to the BCD. If that doesn't work, try connecting the M.2 disk to the motherboard again. Loading it as an external/USB drive is clearly not working.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-07-20T13:00:33+00:00

    Noted. f I hadn't restored bcd.old, which disc ? mine displays C:\ and F:\ not Y:\

    So there's no confusion on my part ,having restored bcd.old and hence now able to boot my PC, do I perform just your previous instructions i.e. :-

    Make a copy of BCD;

    • bcdedit /export c:\bcd.bak2

    Add the dual boot entry.

    • bcdboot D:\Windows

    or is there any other commands I should perform as well ?

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