My laptop comes with 1TB spinning hard disk and 16 GB SSD for Caching. The SSD caching was not working after doing a clean install of Windows 10 Pro.
While trying to enable SSD caching, I decided to format/clean the M.2 SSD. I thought it won't cause any trouble to the Windows 10 installation since the OS is installed on the 1 TB spinning drive.
However, after cleaning the SSD in Diskpart, Windows doesn't boot anymore. I believe this is because Windows 10 stored the boot files on SSD (not sure). After some research online, I had a hunch that I deleted the EFI partition and that is causing the boot errors.
While going through many solutions, I came across Repair Windows 8.1 UEFI booting messed up by Easus Partition Manager? Error Code: 0xc0000225
Many websites mention the same method/steps to fix this problem. So I gave it a try. I was successful until the step of assigning a unique letter to the drive (G in my case) However, I am stuck at the next step. I am.unable to copy the boot files using the command:
cd /d G:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\
When I try the above command, it says
The system cannot find the path specified
I tried multiple variation of the commands but none of them helped.
Any help please? Re-installation is not an option unless it's the only wayto fix this
Is there any other solution for the boot problems I am facing?
Pictures of command window:
You should search for such a small ~ >250 MB Fat32 formatted drive (on Linux it is called sda 1) and clone it separately, in addition to the main drive. In your case, it is the 260 MB drive:
Perhaps also use bootrec to reactivate the boot drive, see https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-performance/windows-10-will-not-boot-disk-0-marked-as-gpt/431dbbee-4fdd-4418-8407-98ae9e885bbe. You can access the msdos command prompt using a regular Windows 10 legacy MBR format boot stick.
Switching from MBR to GPT boot stick might be needed to get to msdos and then to the UEFI (without CSM) boot stick, see here for more details. The two boot sticks were needed in my case, since I did not have any menu / bios at startup, just a repeating Realtec Ethernet information.
In MSDOS, go to d:
, e:
, f:
... until you find the GPT partitioned UEFI (without CSM) stick. When you have found it, type setup
and try to repair a detected Windows.
If that does not help:
Thus, your following comment is probably right:
I believe this is because Windows 10 stored the boot files on SSD (not sure). After some research online, I had a hunch that I deleted the EFI partition and that is causing the boot errors.
Here is how I found out about it (optional read)
I had a similar issue, I had damaged the UEFI (without CSM) boot drive.
Summing it up, I split a 261 MB drive (sda1) into 220 MB for Linux (sda1) and 41 MB for Data (sda5) and destroyed the UEFI Bios with that and which would not make any sense at MB level anyway.
I tried to get the UEFI (without CSM) files back with a Linux undelete software. Getting those UEFI files back from the now-split 261 MB drive should be possible. I tried it with testdisk and also found something, but it was a bit fiddly and I just had a new laptop, thus I decided to format and re-install everything from a "UEFI (without CSM) + GPT Windows 10 boot stick" from scratch instead.
User contributions licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0