Question Moving EFI partition

EricTetz

Distinguished
Oct 13, 2004
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18,510
I have a drive that randomly disconnects from my machine. I has my EFI partition, which means when this drive disappears I can't boot into either of my Windows 10 installations.

I'd like to move the EFI partition to a healthier drive. The main partition on the target drive is tight on space, but it has two 500+MB recovery partitions.

Can I reclaim the space on one of those recovery partitions and move my EFI partition there?

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Well for starters a normal Win 10 installation has 4 partitions, 1 of which Disk Management does not allow you to see. So there's more involved than just moving 1 partition. Second, how the bleep did you even arrive at a situation where the boot loader is on a different drive than the C: partition? You may want to consider a complete reinstallation of Windows so that all the necessary partitions are on the 500GB drive. Note that during the installation process only 1 drive can be connected which is essential to having all of the necessary partitions on the same drive.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Second, how the bleep did you even arrive at a situation where the boot loader is on a different drive than the C: partition?
This often happens when there is more than one drive connected during the OS install.


Note that during the installation process only 1 drive can be connected which is essential to having all of the necessary partitions on the same drive.
And this is how you prevent that.
 
Having the boot partition on a different drive than c:, is the result of a second Windows 10 install on another drive, while the first drive with a Windows install is still connected; the point being Windows will not create a second boot partition if it sees one is already created, even if the Windows install is directed to another drive. Can you delete one of the two recovery partitions? Yes. Can you move the boot partition to another drive. Certainly it can be physically done, but it can cause some instability issues you probably don't want to deal with.
 
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