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Efi partition on seconday hard drive problem

thehay95
Level 7

‎08-14-2018 09:05 PM - last edited on ‎03-06-2024 08:16 PM by Community Admin

Asus GL752VWDH71.1 laptop.

I migrated my W10 OS to a SSD drive
(SAMSUNG 850 EVO M.2 2280 250GB SATA III 3-D Vertical Internal SSD Single Unit Version MZ-N5E250BW ),
with no major problems and the setup performs well. But I have a boot problem.
Every few boots, the BIO defaults to the secondary hard drive.

Then the laptop is stuck in 'Fix mode' until I do a restart and enter BIOS and set the boot back to the SSD.
Then a while later, it does it again.

The one thing I noticed is that the original HDD has a 'EFI' partition, same as the SSD drive.
I'm guessing that is causing the problem.

The 1TB HDD was reformatted and just contains data.

I know that's a protected partition on the HDD, but DISKPART can likely work with it.
But I don't want to reformat the whole drive, just eliminate this EFI partition.

There is no OS on the HDD, it's all on the SSD.

The question is can I eliminate the HDD EFI partition without messing up the boot or system?
And is that likely causing the boot errors?

I can backup the data on the HDD to a USB 3.0 drive as I don't want to lose it. But that would be a PITA.

Thanks.

_______________________
công ty chuyển nhà giá rẻ, giới thiệu giúp việc nhà, là một trong những công ty giup viec nha
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R5Eandme
Level 12

‎08-19-2018 09:04 PM

"The one thing I noticed is that the original HDD has a 'EFI' partition, same as the SSD drive.
I'm guessing that is causing the problem."

I am guessing also that the EFI partition on your HDD is causing the problem. It is a redundant EFI partition and the BIOS is occasionally trying to boot from it. I assume the 1TB HDD is not the boot drive, but a data storage drive, a simple volume. After cloning your partitions to the SSD, you reformatted the HDD but it must have reformatted the "C" partition only, leaving the EFI and other system partitions intact.

I also have a separate simple volume for data storage only (Win 10), not for booting, and have verified that there is no EFI partition. The EFI partition contains the boot manager code that finds the Windows boot loader on the C drive, but since that has been reformatted, you get an error.

I think one solution is to eliminate that redundant EFI partition on the HDD, and in fact it would be better to use the CLEAN command in DISKPART to eliminate EFI and all other partitions, system and otherwise on the HDD and then create a simple GPT data partition. But only after backing up any data you have on there and selecting the HDD as the current drive of focus (SELECT DISK=, followed by CLEAN). Make sure you SELECT the HDD as focus for the CLEAN so as to not accidentally CLEAN your boot SSD drive. Here's a link to the DISKPART commands in case you don't have one.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-R2-and-2012/cc...

Then you should be able to use the Windows Disk Management console to initialize and format the HDD as a simple NTFS volume, assign a drive letter, etc.
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