When you receive an error message that says “No EFI partition was found”, you will fail to boot your Windows OS. This post will focus on how to recover or recreate an EFI partition by sharing effective methods in details.
''My computer is Windows 10 and I encountered a big problem this morning. I was ready to format and install software on my desktop but I got an error message saying that no EFI system partition was found. I'm puzzled. I don’t understand much about what I should do. Can I recover the EFI system? Any advice will be appreciated!''
If you are a computer novice, you are likely to ignore the importance of the EFI system partition, which will lead to the error described above. The most possible reason is that you have deleted the EFI partition by accident at some time you use the computer.
To figure out the consequences if there is no EFI partition, let's have a fundamental understanding of the two following questions.
The EFI system partition(ESP), a small partition on a data storage device, is formatted with FAT32 and usually around 100MB. Generally, if your Windows are on a GPT disk, the EFI partition will be generated to store the important files and necessary utilities which are loaded by UEFI firmware to start the operating system. So when we boot the PC, hardware and firmware will be woken up first, and then firmware trigger the files and utilities stored on the EFI partition, finally, the Windows OS runs successfully.
As we can see, the EFI partition is necessary to guarantee the Windows OS will be booted successfully. Due to its critical importance, you cannot view it in File Explorer directly because it doesn't have a drive letter and you can open Disk Management to find it. This is because the EFI partition is well protected and locked by the Windows operating system in case of your accidental deletion to cause the failure of a bootable OS.
In one word, without EFI partition, you fail to boot your Windows. But in the circumstance where you still delete it by mistake, what can you do?
Once the error ''no EFI partition was found Windows 10'' occurs on your computer, you will find you can’t boot your Windows at once. Since the EFI partition stores significant files and utilities, you will suffer data loss if you delete it accidentally. So, how to recover it is what we are going to discuss. Read the following two detailed tutorials, hope one of them works for you.
As we mentioned above, the EFI partition is protected by Windows, which means you cannot access the inside data through File Explorer or Disk Management. So, we highly recommend you a third-party partition manager called AOMEI partition assistant Professional. With the help of it, you can recover the EFI partition in Windows 11/10/8/7 and XP.
Now, you may want to download the demo version to see how to use it to resolve "no EFI partition found" problem:
Step 1. Install and open AOMEI partition assistant Professional. If you can't boot your PC, you need to create bootable media in a running computer. And then, boot into the software on the problematic PC.
Step 2. At the main interface of the software, select ''Partition Recovery'' from the Recover panel. Then choose the disk which had no EFI partition and click ''Next''.
Step 3. In the pop-out window, select a search method. Choose ''Fast Search'' first; if it doesn't work, turn to ''Full Search''.
Step 4. Select the missing EFI system partition in the following list that appears and hit ''Proceed''.
Moreover, recreating the EFI partition is another alternative method you can choose to solve "no EFI partition was found" issue. That is to say, you need to create an EFI partition and then install an EFI boot loader to make the hard drive bootable. You can try the following steps:
1. Boot your computer from a Windows installation disc or recovery disk. Press Shift+F10 in the setup to enter the command prompt.
2. Run the commands below to shrink a partition to get unallocated space.
♦Diskpart
♦List disk
♦Select disk X (X refers to the disk number of the disk that needs an EFI partition)
♦List partition
♦Select partition N (N means the partition number of the partition that needs to be shrunk)
♦Shrink desired=500 (shrink the partition by 500MB)
3. Then you can create EFI partition using unallocated space with the command below:
♦create partition EFI size=200
♦format quick fs=fat32 label="System"
♦create partition msr size = 128
4. After the EFI partition has been created successfully, use the commands below to install bootloader and other essential applications.
♦bootrec /fixboot
♦bcdboot c:\Windows /s b: /f all
5. Reboot your computer to see whether the "no EFI system partition was found" error is solved.
No EFI partition was found? Now, you may know what caused it and what will happen if there is no partition. The most important is you know how to solve the error. This tutorial shows you step by step how to recover EFI partition with AOMEI Partition Assistant or recreate EFI partition with diskpart. After getting it back as before, you'd better back up the system to avoid it happening again. For example, you can clone your OS to another drive as a duplicate. Plus, if your PC is running with Server system, you can turn to the Server Edition to solve it.