Delete EFI partition on external drive.

Question

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 ?

Answer 1

It can't be both. You boot from one disk only.

Disk 1's EFI partition is the one being used now.

I see three 465 GB disks and three EFI partitions.

Can you post a full screenshot of Disk Management?

Answer 2

The EFI partition will be inaccessible due to its partition type ID. This is normal. The external drive is probably Disk 2, and we want to delete the EFI partition from that disk. A full screenshot of Disk Management will help me identify the disk number.

Answer 3

I see now, booting from image as EFI not 'greyed, out. What partition (Home or Image) is being used? I think it's Home (C:/)

As requested:

and with external drive connected

Answer 4

It isn't a good idea to leave an original and cloned version of a drive on the same system.

If you want to know where it is booting from, use this.

C:\Windows\System32>bcdedit

Windows Boot Manager

---

identifier {bootmgr}

device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume1

path \EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\BOOTMGFW.EFI

description Windows Boot Manager

locale en-US

inherit {globalsettings}

flightsigning Yes

default {current}

resumeobject {a2261767-baf4-11ed-b39f-861e8bfa3876}

displayorder {6713eba6-d8c2-11ee-845c-8ca53cacc006}

                    {current} 

toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}

timeout 30