Windows 10: 'Unsupported Disk Layout for UEFI Firmware' yet BIOS Mode set to UEFI

@NavyLCDR Can you elaborate what options in the 'Fix Windows Boot Problems' I should use? I just finished running through your suggestions and before I restored the image from Macrium it looked like my SSD had the proper partitions with an EFI partition But then I restored the image onto just the C partition and then left all of the checks enabled in the Fix Windows Boot Problems. After I restarted my computer it looked like I was back where i started. So I'm currently running through the steps a second time now.

My guess is it was one of the 'Fix Windows Boot Problems' options I selected. Or is it possible the restoring of the image resulted in getting back to the original step? Should i have shrunk the partition before taking the Macrium Reflect Image?

I wasn't too excited about doing a reinstall of windows, but the imaging thing I think makes it less of a pain (if I get it working)

will update if my second go around yields better results

 

So just finished my second attempt. It seems the image I made keeps overwriting the GPT back to MBR during the image restore process

Is there a way to not have that happen?

 

Are you trying to restore the whole image or just the C partition from your image? Just do the C partition. Just drag the C partition from the image to the C partition of your clean install. Don't bother with any of the other partitions.

 

Wait, you're supposed to drag the partition from the image to the partition you want to overwrite? Oh, I was just trying to select the C: partition so it had this tiny blue underline under it. ughhh ok lemme try this again.

 

My mistake - I meant 1703.

 

Well dragging the image partition works. I feel like an idiot.

Windows is now downloading the upload, something that hadn't happened before.

I'm going to bed but in the morning if the download and upgrade works I'll mark this as resolved.

Thanks everyone for your help thus far. I really appreciate it.

 

Great, I'm glad it worked for you. You're not an idiot because you're unfamiliar with a piece of software. If that were so I would have been locked up years ago. Congratulations for trying something new. I hope everything worked. @cereberus and @NavyLCDR deserve the credit for their help.

 

Looks like I was finally able to upgrade to version 1607! Woo




Heres my final DiskManagement and Disk Part screenshots. Let me know if anything doesn't look quite right. But so far things seemed to be all good.

Disk Management




Disk Part




Thanks again, all 3 of you were incredibly helpful. I've learned a lot these last two days and I gotta say Macrium Reflect is super slick.

I'm marking this as Solved, Thank You for helping me resolve a 6 month long issue!

 

You can delete the scond recovery partition that is at the end of the drive and extend the C: drive partition to fill that space. MiniTool Partition Wizard is a very easy program to do that with. When I get home tonight I could provide the diskpart commands to do it with.

Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free

 

Either is fine, the information to do it through diskpart could be beneficial but I can also just use the link you provided. Thanks!

 

NavyLCDR.. I wanted to say thanks for the idea. This worked great for me.

I had 1703, and could not get 1709 through the regular update. After researching for a few days, found out that my C drive was an MBR drive. It was booting with the Windows bootloader in UEFI-bios.
I could not get MBR2GPT to run, it was the dreaded 'OS cannot be found' error. Also, the 'disk layout is invalid.'
Diskpart revealed there were only 3 partitions on the HD. No EFI partition existed, although windows said it was a UEFI boot.

I had cloned the drive a few months ago, with Macrium reflect free, and apparently did not select the right things to do when cloning to a larger SSD. I also note that Macrium moves the boot files from C:\Boot to C:\Boot\Macrium\WA10KFiles\media. Therefore BCDEDIT, mbr2gpt, etc. could not find the boot files at all, although the actual computer was booting fine.

Anyway, last ditch effort and ending my searching, I happened across you guys' comments, and as I knew that macrium was involved with the booting since I had cloned, I did what you detailed above. I already had macrium installed on another drive, so there was no need to reinstall it, fortunately.
It is important folks follow your steps IN ORDER, as a rescue USB created PRIOR to the re-install of windows will not work, you will get an error of 'Can not continue, C drive is in use...'. You must create the rescue USB AFTER you install windows 10 and re-install or restart Macrium.
Noted while removing partitions, I deleted every one of them, and one said it was on a different drive, drive F. No idea why it assigned it that way, I noticed that in rescue mode the letters were different, fortunately I knew the difference from the drive models in my 5 disk system, and as C drive as Disk 3, I used that method of telling which drive to remove partitions from. (Diskpart through command listed C drive as disk 3 as well.)
I IMAGED the C drive to start this, from one SSD to a larger SSD, and 90gig took about 6 minutes to image. It took almost the same time for the image to be restored back to the C drive.
Another comment from essenbe was right, when restoring the image ion Macrium, UNCHECK the little partitions, only leaving the primary (drive) partition checked before you do any dragging, and drag the bottom image partition to the top, checked actual drive partition.


Thanks to this thread for saving me the usual many many hours it would have taken to reinstall so many apps/prgs. !