If you don’t know how to create UEFI partition in Windows 10, this post will help you with a step-by-step guide.
“Planning to install Windows 10 on my SSD but still maintaining my old HDD with the original OS. I may remove the HDD and use the SSD as my only OS, but my SSD hasn’t an EFI partition and bootable files. Is there a method to create an EFI partition on my new SSD?”
If you also have an idea to make a data disk bootable, an EFI partition is a necessary condition. There’s no UEFI partition, UEFI is a bootable mode that’s different from Legacy BIOS. Here we’ll show some basics about UEFI and EFI partition.
UEFI & EFI partition
▶ UEFI As the successor to Legacy, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is now the boot mode in popular for modern devices. When compared to Legacy, UEFI features enhanced programmability, scalability, speed, and security. When users boot PC by UEFI mode, it will detect the system hardware and control the hardware initialization using the loaded EFI partition to boot OS faster.
▶ EFI partition The EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) system partition, often known as the ESP (EFI system partition), is a partition on a disk used by computers with UEFI.
The boot loaders or kernel images for all installed operating systems, device driver files for hardware devices present in a computer and needed by the firmware at boot time, and system utility programs are all stored on the EFI partition.
EFI partition only appears on GPT system disk. So, if you wish to make your SSD as a system disk and your device supports UEFI boot mode, you can initialize it as GPT partition style to have faster-running speed and better performance.
As the example we show at the beginning, if you wish to make your second data disk a GPT system disk, you’ll need to create EFI partition. In this part, we have 2 methods for you.
Step 1. Press “Windows”+ “R” and type “CMD”, click “OK” to open CMD.
Step 2. Input the command lines below to shrink a partition to get unallocated space.
• diskpart • list disk • select disk x (x represents the sequence number of the disk where an EFI partition is required) • list partition • select partition n (n represent the sequence number of the partition to be shrunk) • shrink desired=500 (shrink the partition by 500MB)
Step 3. Now, create an EFI system partition by using the unallocated space with the command lines below.
• create partition efi • format fs=fat32 quick • assign letter=Y • exit (exit diskpart.exe)
• bcdboot C:\windows /s Y:
Then you can boot from boot drive alone. And install OS on that disk. Don’t forget to enable UEFI boot mode if you want to boot on a Legacy BIOS device.
Using CMD to create EFI partition, you need to correctly type many commands. If one of them is wrong, your devices might be damaged.
To avoid all troubles you might meet when you use CMD, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is a great alternative tool. The function “Quick Partition” can automatically set all partitions in the correct way, With only a few clicks, you can quickly create a bootable GPT disk for installing OS.
What's more, if you want to use a familiar OS, this convenient program also provides the "Migrate OS" feature, which can directly migrate existing OS and all related partitions to the target disk. You don't need to create a new system and EFI partitions or install OS by yourself.
▶ Note: All data on the target disk will be removed, please back up if you have something important.
The operation is quite simple, we’ll show all details you need to pay attention to.
After you install the program, in the interface, right-click the disk you want to edit, and choose the “Quick Partition” function. Then you’ll see a pop window with all details about the disk you’re creating.
Step 1. In this part, you can choose the number of the partition that will be created on the selected disk.
Step 2. Under the partition number, you can choose the partition type. Here, we need to choose a GPT disk and tick all squares to automatically create an EFI partition, align partitions and rebuild MBR.
Step 3. On the right, you can adjust all parameters of each partition.
Step 4. When all the settings are done, the partition layout of the disk after being partitioned will be presented in the preview window. Please click the "Start Partitioning" button to perform the task.
When the task is finished, the target disk will have an EFI partition and you can install Windows OS when you need.
Creating EFI partition in Windows 10 is necessary to make a GPT disk bootable. After this, you can install OS on that disk"Disk Clone Wizard” features to help you, if you wish to use your personal OS and all installed programs on the new disk without wasting time to install the system and software.
By the way, we also offer the Server edition for Server users, you can easily manage your Server as your Windows PC.