Windows 10: "Windows" or "EFI boot" ?

I used to run only Windows 10 on my Macbook Pro 13" mid 2012 non-retina. Today I upgraded to an SSD and though of doing a fresh install of windows. I made a bootable usb through media creation tool. Now, when I installed my ssd and plugged in the usb, it showed me two options "Windows" and "EFI Boot". Both option were from the usb and both when clicked landed on the same windows installation dialogue box. I need to know which one should I select and also why.

:)

 

Which tool to recover the EFI partition? Booted into Rescue Disk

That's not what they suggest here:

FIX: Steps to Fix Winload.EFI Error - Appuals.com

Winload.EFI Error, is pretty much self explanatory by it’s name is an error that prevents windows from loading. This is usually caused by corrupt boot records or incorrect boot configuration. Depending on your Operating System, the error message may vary but the keyword winload.efi will be same. On a Windows 8/8.1/10 system, the error usually pops-up in the following form.

 

Windows defender offline error: EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD - 0xc0000185

Hi Dave,

Could you provide us additional information to assist you better with this issue:

• What is the make and model of your device?
• Have you made any changes to the operating system prior to this issue?
• Are you able to boot the device to desktop with this error message?

This issue might have occurred due to corruption in the boot files or BOIS unable to detect your drive to boot.

I suggest you to refer to the below thread, check if your issue matches with the same.

If so, try the troubleshooting steps suggested by -.[Final]#[Boss].- and check if
it helps.

Error code after update File:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot BCD
Error Code 0xc0000185 BSOD

Hope this information is helpful.

 

UEFI boot options disappeared from BIOS; now getting reboot and select proper boot device

In short, I need to get the system/BIOS to allow UEFI booting of the SSD.

Computer started up today with default BIOS settings.

• Only SSD 1(Windows boot) and SSD 2 were listed in BIOS; HDD 1 and HDD 2 were not visible
• System would not boot. Gave the 'reboot and select proper boot device' message
• Boot menu has no UEFI/EFI (or Windows Boot Manager) entries anymore

I went into Partition Magic/Gparted and confirmed :

• All drives are still showing
• All drives' data is in tact [EFI volume/partition is still listed (and can be browsed/files accessible)]

Gparted print out (note dev/sda2 apparently that is normal behavior) :

/dev/sda1 (locked) EFI System Partition--Fat32--/media/sda1--100.00mb--46.81MiB--53.19MiB--boot,esp
/dev/sda2 (exclamation mark) Microsoft reserved partition--unknown file system--no mount point--128.00MiB--unused spaced--msftres
/dev/sda3 basic data partition--ntfs--/media/sda3--118.58GiB--70.78GiB--47.80GiB--msftdata
/dev/sda4--ntfs--/media/sda4--450.00MiB--327.71MiB--122.29MiB--hidden,diag



As I am able to boot Windows installation from USB, I tried the standard startup repair. It said it was not able to fix any problems.

Next I tried to repair the EFI with Diskpart in the shell:

• sel vol 1 (note that Diskpart states EFI partition is 'hidden')
• assign letter=z:
• cd /d z:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\
• bootrec /fixboot
• bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-us /s vz /f ALL

It completed all tasks successfully. Unfortunately that did not work.

Other things I have tried :

• Removing CMOS battery and replacing with a new one - my HDD started showing up again after doing this.
• Using the old MBR commands(in hopes it would force the Windows startup repair to recognize and fix a problem)

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd​

• Loaded BIOS 'optimized'/defaults (the system did this already once before, hence why I am in this situation, though doing it manually seemed like an option worth trying. Note that after doing this and restarting the system, HDD's stopped showing again)
• Removed new CMOS battery and left it out of the system for thirty minutes
• Formatted EFI and msftres partitions, then rebuilt the EFI boot records

In summary, am looking to force the BIOS to see the EFI partition on the SSD boot drive, as it is not an option any longer.