Windows 10 help needed

I know most of the people on this forum are Mac users, but there seem to be a few knowledgeable Windows users too.

I have a Window 10 system that I built. It was originally intended to be a Hackintosh, but I got tired of the constant struggle to keep the drivers up to date, and trying to get all the Mac special features running. Anyway, I made it into a Windows 10 only system.

But somehow I managed to screw up the boot partitions. The system as a 525GB Crucial SSD and a Seagate 4TB HD. The Windows boot partition is on the SSD. But the EFI partition is on the HD. If I disconnect the HD, no boot.

There's a second NTFS partition on the SSD, about 400MB. That should be more than enough for the EFI, but it's AFTER the boot partition.

How do I get the EFI loaded onto the partition? Booting Win10 off a USB and trying to "repair" the install doesn't work.

Help?

How do I get the EFI loaded onto the partition? Booting Win10 off a USB and trying to "repair" the install doesn't work.

It has been a long while since I've had to tinker with this, but I believe you need to boot via the media and drop out to a command prompt...

You'll need to use diskpart to create that second partition as EFI, then use bcdboot to install that (new) EFI as the system boot partition.

Adam

I gave up. I couldn't figure out how to add the EFI partition, so I figured I'd do a system image backup to another drive, then format the disk from scratch. That seemed to work fine.

But then Windows absolutely refused to restore the image. No matter how I booted the system and mounted/unmounted the drive with the image backup, it just wouldn't do it. I booted from USB, I booted from a system recovery DVD. Same problems. I removed the drive from the computer, booted it up, then mounted the drive using an external drive dock. That got me the closest, but it still gave me a failure message when it started to do the restore. I think Microsoft's tools are just broken.

I could probably have done it properly with Acronis, but I didn't have that installed on any of my systems.

Sigh.

So I'm rebuilding the Win10 box from scratch. Including downloading and installing probably 100GB of games and other software.