How to Clone EFI Partition to Another Drive on Windows 10?

How can I copy EFI partition to another drive?

Hi, I think I need some help or suggestions. Recently, I bought a new laptop. The HDD is in GPT partition style with an EFI partition. I heard this partition is important for system booting and without it I can’t boot into Windows. So, I wanna ask whether there’s a way to clone EFI partition to another drive for backup? Thank you!

Why clone EFI partition?

An EFI system partition (ESP) is a partition in FAT 32 that is created by a GPT hard drive. This partition stores necessary EFI boot loaders and apps used by firmware at the system during start-up. Both Windows and Mac support the EFI partition. ESP is usually in 100MB and you can’t see it in File Explorer because it doesn’t have a drive letter assigned.

If you accidentally delete this partition or it disappears somehow, you won’t be able to boot into your computer anymore. In this case, it’s necessary to make a backup of it by cloning it to another hard drive like a USB stick in case of loss. For EFI partition remains unchanged whether there’s an update or not, you just need to have one backup.

How to clone EFI partition on Windows 10?

As mentioned above, in order to make a backup of EFI partition, what you need to do is to clone EFI partition to another hard disk. But how? This time, I recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, a powerful and impressive disk manager, to help clone partition with much ease. It’s secure and quick. In the course of the clone, no data will be lost and it only takes several seconds before completed. Meanwhile, apart from partition clone, disk clone is also available if you want to copy the entire data from a hard disk to another.

Note: Before we start, please ensure there’s unallocated space on the destination disk otherwise, you should shrink or delete a partition to create it.

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Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant,  right-click the partition you want to clone and select the "Clone Partition" tool to run partition clone. (You can also click the "Clone" main tab and select "Clone Partition".)

Step 2. In next window, select the destination partition or unallocated space to hold your source partition, and then click "Confirm".

Step 3. Then, you will enter the Confirm interface where you can check the source and destination clone location. After all is set, you can click the "Confirm" button to continue.

Notes:

• There is a "4k alignment" option. If you want to copy a partition onto a SSD (Solid State Drive), ticking this option will optimize the read and write speed on this partition. It can also extend the life of the SSD.
• If you select the "Sector-by-Sector Clone" mode, the unallocated space must be equal or larger than source partition. If you tick the option, it will be unable to resize the destination partition.

Step 4. In the next window, you can click the "Settings" button to adjust the target partition size. As you can see from the screenshot, you could adjust the size of source partition in order to fit the target partition as per your need, or directly skip the step and click "Save".

Step 5. You can preview the partition copy operating by viewing the "Pending Operations". To commit the "Pending Operations", please click "Apply" and "Proceed".

The cloning process will start and you can check the cloning process. Once the process is completed successfully, you will get a congratulation window. Finally, you can check the partition layout on the destination disk will be identical to the source partition.

FAQ about EFI partition

How to recover an EFI partition when it goes missing?

When the EFI partition go missing, your PC can’t be booted. In this case, you might as well upgrade AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to the Professional edition and try its partition recovery wizard. But first, you should create a bootable disk with this software on a normal computer and boot the problematic computer from the bootable disk.

1. When the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional appears, Click “Recover” on in the top toolbar, and choose “Partition Recovery”.

2. Then, there’ll be 2 search methods. Here, I recommend “Fast Search”. If it doesn’t work, then, turn to “Full Search” to try again. Click on “Next” to proceed.

3. Selected the deleted boot partition in the following list and hit “Proceed” to start the recovery.

How to create an EFI partition if it can’t be retrieved?

If the EFI system partition still can’t be recovered with any third-party software, you may need to use Command Prompt to recreate an EFI partition and install EFI boot loader to make the hard disk bootable again.

1. Boot your PC from a Windows installation disk or recovery disk. Hit Shift and F10 simultaneously in the setup screen to enter the Command Prompt window.

2. Run the commands below to shrink a partition to get unallocated space.

Diskpart

List disk

Select disk X (X represents the disk number of the disk that needs an EFI partition)

List partition

Select partition N (N represents the partition number of the partition that needs shrinking)

Shrink desired=500 (shrink the partition by 500MB)

3. Then, you can create a new EFI partition by using the created unallocated space with the commands below.

create partition EFI size=200

format quick fs=fat32 label="System"

create partition msr size = 128

4. After that, use the commands below to install the boot loader and other necessary apps.

bootrec /fixboot

bcdboot c:\Windows /s b: /f all

Conclusion

Can I copy EFI partition to another drive? This question should be asked by a cautious man who wishes to make a backup of the very partition to keep it secure. In the tutorial above, I explained what an EFI partition is, why we should clone it, and how. In the second half of the contents, I also introduced how to recover or recreate an EFI partition when it’s missing. As for me, I once lost my EFI partition and it was the AOMEI product that helped me recover it. I was a Windows user and so I used AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. But if your computer is on Server, you can try the Server edition.