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

CMD's run and partition deleted. Thanks very much for your instructions.

SSD not 'visible' in file folder because has no formatted volume. How do I merge above partitions, create a single volume that can be formatted??

Answer 2

If closing and reopening Disk Management doesn't help, you can try the diskpart clean command to merge those two unallocated spaces on Disk 2.

Important: When running the clean command, take extra care when inputting the disk number. It wipes the chosen disk entirely.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/85819-erase...

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Answer 3

Alternatively, we can manually delete the 16 MB MSR partition and create a contiguous unallocated space.

Run:

diskpart
select disk 2
list partition

Share the output.

Answer 4

Hi Saltgrass,

Thanks for your response . Your not the first to state "it isn't a good idea to leave an original and cloned version of a drive on the same system". All my previous desktops from Windows 7 onwards had dual HDD's/SSD's installed providing boot and image. It's only now (windows 11) that I've had any problems.

Ran bcdedit and result is:

Can't say I understand what I'm looking at. for example, the bootmgr identifier device states 'HarddiskVolume5' - Volume 5 ?

I also assume it is using C:/ bootloader (drive 0)

As previously advised, why I thought both disk were involved in the loading windows 11 OS is that both disks have be connected. If I disconnect the 'image' drive (1), boot fails. Both must be connected for successful boot. I'm at a loss to see/understand which drive (0 or 1) is being for boot from the above and why it fails if drive 1 is disconnected

Answer 5

Magic! Disc cleaned, initialised and volume created. Now back in operation. Many thanks for your support.

Now to see what happens when I try and image C:/ to this external drive,

Concerned that have to have both internal (C:/ and D:/ - original image) drives for system to successfully boot.