Windows 10: Windows 10 OS - GPT Primary Partition Set As EFI System Partition

Greetings! This is my first problem post here on TenForums and it is a frustrating one. To make a long story short, I installed Windows 10 on my notebook, leaving a large amount of unallocated space available for a future Linux install. Windows 10 had been running without issue until I decided to get my Linux environment up and running.

I followed a very well known guide to install a particular distro in dual-boot with Windows 10, but upon reboot I was not able to get into my Windows OS. After a number of attempts to fix, repair, etc., I decided to clean the disk of everything Linux related, which leaves me with my original four partitions:

Part 1 - Recovery
Part 2 - Reserved
Part 3 - System (OS)
Part 4 - System (EFI)

After following another few guides to repair/fix EFI boot records and directories, I was still unable to boot into Windows OS. I will either get a "No Media Present" error or I will get an error that says that WinLoad.EFI cannot be found.

After some more research I noticed in DISKPART that my Windows OS partition, which should be a Primary partition, has the TYPE attribute of an EFI System Partition. My conclusion is that at some point in the install or attempt to fix my Windows OS boot, the Windows OS system partition was told that it was an EFI System Partition, thus unable to boot as an OS.

As it stands, I have two EFI System Partitions, one that should contain all the correct boot information and one that is actually my Windows OS and should be a primary partition.

My question is this, could I simply use the SETID command in DISKPART to change the ID/Type of the partition to be something other than an EFI System Partition? Or is there another option here? My primary goal is to retrieve my data from my Windows OS partition. I am planning on cleaning the drive and starting from scratch after retrieving the data, so if there is a better approach, such as a live boot disk that will let me copy the data off, I would be willing to go that route.

Thanks for your help and advice!

:)

 

Dual Boot Linux Manjaro Issues in Windows 10

AFAIK you cannot create extended partitions if you use GPT partition table (common on EFI systems). GPT only allows primary partitions (up to 128 I think). Thus, you cannot create logical partitions either, because they can be only created within extended
partitions.

The solution with extended partitions is for systems like BIOS who cannot have more than 4 primary partitions and therefore needed that workaround since Windows is commonly taking 2-4 primary partitions for itself (one for recovery, one for MBR, one for
the OS itself and one for user data).

But that does not matter to Linux though. Linux can run on any partition while Windows needs to be on a primary partition.

What kind of error did you get when you tried to install it on a primary partition ?

 

Windows 10 1709 64bit, windows image restore to a new drive fails, error 0x80042302

I checked a couple more system disks of 512GB on different PC's that had the partitions created by the install of a fresh windows 10 1709.

The partitions look all the same and in the same order:



1) 499MB GPT NTFS (Recovery partition) Status None

2) 100MB GPT FAT32 (EFI System partition Status Active & System

3) 16MB GPT Other (Reserved partition) Status None

4) 476.3 GB GPT NTFS (Data Partition) Status Boot

The EFI partition would be 260MB for an ADF disk (4K sectors)

 

Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk - - Windows 10 Forums

 

Thanks for the referral, I'll check it out and give it a shot. I'm currently in a secure environment and can't connect USB devices, so I'll have to try this out when I return home or find wireless.

 

Once you can get into a command prompt with administrator privileges its:

diskpart
list disk
select disk # <- replace # with the disk number of the drive you need to change
list part
select part # <- replace # with the partition number of the Windows partition
set id=ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7 override
exit
exit