Why is Win 10 / UEFI boot so fragile?!

G

GHacker

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 1, 2002
Messages
386
OK I'm so pissed right now. I got an HP prebuilt with Win 10 Home x64. I added a M2 drive and used Macrium to move the OS from the HDD to the M2 and set the PC to boot from the M2 and everything was wonderful. I did tons of work updating and getting everything just the way I want it. I wanted to use the original HDD for storage so I used diskpart to delete all the partitions from the HDD and reformatted as one large partition. Rebooted the PC and poof, my boot is broken hard. I can't even access recovery options from the M2 to try to fix it - I have to create recovery media.

I know I was booting from the M2 and I know the partitions I deleted were on the HDD - why does working with one disk impact booting from the other? This is not the first time this has happened to me with UEFI - it seems anytime I work with disks or fart in their general direction on a UEFI system my boot gets broken beyond Startup Repair's ability to fix. I'm getting really annoyed with this.

Has anyone else experienced this? It seems like anytime I do any operation that might impact any drive number or letter, even other than the boot drive, my boot gets borked. WTF? I know I'm on a rant here - can anyone help me to understand or suggest what I might be doing wrong or the right free programs or tools I can use to fix my broken system or prevent this from happening in the future? I don't think my latest Macrium will help me - it was made from the M2 which should still be intact but doesn't seem to be able to boot without the HDD.

Can you help a brother out?
 
Did you try booting from the SSD with the HDD detached?

I've had wacky stuff survive partition deletes and reformats, but not usually on Windows...
 
The Windows Boot Manager entry was probably still pointing to the boot loader on the EFD partition of the hard drive.

Try hitting F12 during boot up to see if a boot selection menu pops up. If might be able to find the EFI partition on the M.2 drive and boot up that way.
 
ryan_975 said:
The Windows Boot Manager entry was probably still pointing to the boot loader on the EFD partition of the hard drive.

Try hitting F12 during boot up to see if a boot selection menu pops up. If might be able to find the EFI partition on the M.2 drive and boot up that way.
Click to expand...

This is very likely your issue, i ran into this as well. The boot loader was likely on the HDD, and you wiped it when you reformatted it.
 
Disconnecting the HDD didn't help - I think it is more of a needs something from the deleted partitions than residuals left behind kind of problem. It still booted with the HDD attached when the HDD still had the original layout from the OS on it - died after I formatted over that.

I was seeing the M2 as the only boot option before I enabled legacy boot options, but specifying it explicitly still doesn't boot. You're probably right about the system looking for the EFI info on the old HDD. How can I see the system's EFI boot settings and list disks / partitions so I can try to patch up the broken booting? Startup repair from from recovery media is useless.

Thanks for the suggestions but so far I'm still stuck.
 
Did you clone all of the partitions from the HDD to the M.2 drive, or just the OS partition?
 
Toss GParted onto a USB stick and take a look. It lies less than Microsoft's partitioning tools. You can even mount stuff and see what's going on, and copy / make changes.
 
I cloned all of the partitions from the HDD to the M2 with some requisite resizing. I just did a bcdedit from recovery media and it found no bcd to edit - it must have somehow still resided on and been referenced to the HDD. Do I have any hope of generating a BCD or maybe I can pull it out of a older Macrium from the HDD and modify to reference the M2? What is the file for EFI and how do I edit it - it must be in the EFI partition right? Sorry, google has yielded little to help - most of it is to help invoke Windows' startup repair. I never had these problems with MBR - for a supposedly superior and more flexible boot process there is surprisingly little useful info available on how to actually work with UEFI - can anyone point me to a good guide? Thanks.
 
Try disabling secure boot? One of the benefits of UEFI is that it can be sensitive to changes made to the boot partition(s), which is great for preventing rootkit installation.

You likely lost the BCD when you formatted the HDD. I've been burned with Windows putting the boot info on another drive but was fortunate that it was either able to recover or I still had the drive and simply reconnected it and then corrected the issue. You should have 2-3 partitions on the SSD, one being an EFI partition. You can even create an EFI partition if it doesn't exist and then install the EFI stuff to get it to boot, I've done that before but can't remember the process (Google).

If this isn't some POS AMD-based HP that can't complete the Windows installation because it needs some very specific drivers (I ran into that with an AMD-based Dell, still can't believe it), I'd go the nuclear route: Download the Windows 10 media creation tool, delete all partitions, and do a fresh install on that SSD, do it with the HDD disconnected so it doesn't interfere. If you need to recover data, buy a USB adapter for the M.2 to get to the data before wiping.
 
Sorry you're having issues, it really can be very fickle, and even the order in which things are done can throw up Bitlocker recovery codes, which seems crazy to me.
 
I've been using UEFI booting Since Windows 7 and have not had these issues. But I also don't using hard drive cloning utilities to move my OS between drives, I always clean install. Maybe that's part of your problem?

I will give you that UEFI/GPT booting is definitely more complicated.
 
Hey everyone I had to take some time away to chill and do outdoor stuff but I finally got back on this and was able to get the PC booting again using info from this link: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...s-denied/747c4180-7ff3-4bc2-b6cc-81e572d546df. :woot: After doing the updated procedure from BillyBigun there I had 1 more boot failure but the error code changed from ..225 to ..001 I think. I went back into the BIOS and set all of my boot options back to what they were originally (even secure boot) before I had to boot from alternate media and the system booted up to my Windows login and all seems well. Thanks for the help and suggestions and sympathy - maybe someone else will stumble onto this and it will help them out. (y)
 
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