Windows no longer has a bootable partition?

[Tetoris]

Hello, today has been a very bizarre day for me. A friend gave me a hard drive he didn't use to install on my PC. I opened my pc up yesterday and plugged it in to see if it worked alright. It worked so I unplugged it. Today I wanted to install the drive in my case properly and I took the chance to clean the system as I was doing that. I cleaned it, installed the drive and I went to test if everything worked before I closed everything up. EVERYTHING WORKED, I booted into windows saw all the drives were there and all was good. I shut the PC down, put all the side panels back and when I turned it back on suddenly my m.2 ssd was being detected but could not boot into windows. A UEFI windows partition was no longer available in the BIOS, the drive only showed up as it's model number ADATA SX200 PRO (or something along those lines) and it wasn't showing up with it's total space capacity like all my other SATA drives. I also swapped my m.2 drive to the bottom slot instead of the top one but it still did nothing. I got worried that my drive got busted but it seems like it's fine? I went into a bootable windows USB and the drive shows up with its normal capacity, my files are there according to diskpart but there is no bootable partition on the drive, there is only the partition with my files.

 

PC Specs:

Mobo: ASUS ROG B450-F

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 

RAM: 16gb GSkill Trident Z 3200MHZ

GPU:Zotac GTX 1060 3GB

Case NZXT H500i

PSU: Cooler Master 450W 80+ Bronze (if i remember correctly)

 

ALL IN ALL my question is: Is there any way to recover or recreate that bootable partition or would I have to reinstall Windows?

[RONOTHAN##]

3 minutes ago, Tetoris said:

Is there any way to recover or recreate that bootable partition or would I have to reinstall Windows?

Yeah, it's possible, I've had to do it before when getting rid of dual boots or trying to fix when the Windows installer for whatever reason decided to put the boot partition on a secondary HDD rather than the main boot drive (this is what I suspect happened with you, it's a pretty common bug). A tutorial like this one is what I followed when doing so, it's a simple set of commands you run inside the Windows install USB with diskpart.

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/computer-problems/restore-efi-partition-on-windows-10.html

[Tetoris]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yeah, it's possible, I've had to do it before when getting rid of dual boots or trying to fix when the Windows installer for whatever reason decided to put the boot partition on a secondary HDD rather than the main boot drive (this is what I suspect happened with you, it's a pretty common bug). A tutorial like this one is what I followed when doing so, it's a simple set of commands you run inside the Windows install USB with diskpart.

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/computer-problems/restore-efi-partition-on-windows-10.html

Alright I'll try these commands and I'll get back to you, thanks.

[Tetoris]

I 

5 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yeah, it's possible, I've had to do it before when getting rid of dual boots or trying to fix when the Windows installer for whatever reason decided to put the boot partition on a secondary HDD rather than the main boot drive (this is what I suspect happened with you, it's a pretty common bug). A tutorial like this one is what I followed when doing so, it's a simple set of commands you run inside the Windows install USB with diskpart.

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/computer-problems/restore-efi-partition-on-windows-10.html

It doesn't let me create the partition because it says I don't have enough space, however when I go to the Windows Install Screen I can see that the drive has 10gb of free space which is about right. None of my other drives have free space according to diskpart except for one which has 1024KB and is not my main drive.

 

The error message is as follows:

"No usable free extent could be found. It may be that there is insufficient free space to create a partition at the specified size or offset. Specify different size and offset values or don't specify either to create the maximum sized partition. It may be that the disk is partitioned using the MVR disk partitioning format and the disk contains either 4 primary partitions, ( no more partitions may be created), or 3 priary partitions and one extended partition, (only logical drives may be created)."

[RONOTHAN##]

20 minutes ago, Tetoris said:

I 

It doesn't let me create the partition because it says I don't have enough space, however when I go to the Windows Install Screen I can see that the drive has 10gb of free space which is about right. None of my other drives have free space according to diskpart except for one which has 1024KB and is not my main drive.

 

The error message is as follows:

"No usable free extent could be found. It may be that there is insufficient free space to create a partition at the specified size or offset. Specify different size and offset values or don't specify either to create the maximum sized partition. It may be that the disk is partitioned using the MVR disk partitioning format and the disk contains either 4 primary partitions, ( no more partitions may be created), or 3 priary partitions and one extended partition, (only logical drives may be created)."

You will probably need to shrink the partition of that drive in order to put the EFI partition on it. I forget the exact commands you have to do for this, though I'm pretty sure you select the partition, then run "shrink desired=512"

 

Afterwards you should be able to create the EFI partition. 

[Tetoris]

17 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

You will probably need to shrink the partition of that drive in order to put the EFI partition on it. I forget the exact commands you have to do for this, though I'm pretty sure you select the partition, then run "shrink desired=512"

 

Afterwards you should be able to create the EFI partition. 

Just tried it and it came back with: "Virtual Disk Service Error: The Specified shrink size is too big and will cause the volume to be smaller than the minimum volume size."

Could I use something like GParted and make the partition manually?

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, Tetoris said:

Could I use something like GParted and make the partition manually?

Yeah, that's an option. I know there is a way to do it through diskpart, I just forget the exact command to do it. 

[Tetoris]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yeah, that's an option. I know there is a way to do it through diskpart, I just forget the exact command to do it. 

So I want to make a 512mb sized EFI partition?

 

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, Tetoris said:

So I want to make a 512mb sized EFI partition?

 

Yeah, you want something about that size. 

[Tetoris]

59 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yeah, you want something about that size. 

OK a few things happened since the last update, 

I tried using GParted but since I was unfamilliar with it I didn;t wanna cause more damage so what I ended up doing is installing windows on the new hard drive I got and from there I tried using Disk Management to make the partition. It currently says that there are 0 MB of available shrink space. I checked and all my files are there, music and videos are playable so I was thinking if, as a last resort, I could transfer my files to the new drive then reinstall windows on the main ssd, but I'd rather avoid that if possible. Tl:dr Windows says that it can't shrink the partition.

[RONOTHAN##]

5 hours ago, Tetoris said:

OK a few things happened since the last update, 

I tried using GParted but since I was unfamilliar with it I didn;t wanna cause more damage so what I ended up doing is installing windows on the new hard drive I got and from there I tried using Disk Management to make the partition. It currently says that there are 0 MB of available shrink space. I checked and all my files are there, music and videos are playable so I was thinking if, as a last resort, I could transfer my files to the new drive then reinstall windows on the main ssd, but I'd rather avoid that if possible. Tl:dr Windows says that it can't shrink the partition.

OK, that's really weird, that makes it seem like the drive is MBR rather than GPT, but if it was you shouldn't need an EFI partition. Did you maybe try enabling CSM to see if that lets the system boot?

[Tetoris]

21 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

OK, that's really weird, that makes it seem like the drive is MBR rather than GPT, but if it was you shouldn't need an EFI partition. Did you maybe try enabling CSM to see if that lets the system boot?

I checked and the options are:

Launch CSM - Enabled

Boot Device Control was on UEFI only which I now changed to UEFI and Legacy OPROM

and Boot from Network / Storage Devices /PCI-E Expansion Devices are Legacy Only

 

So I assume it's enabled and it's still not booting to the SSD

[RONOTHAN##]

4 minutes ago, Tetoris said:

I checked and the options are:

Launch CSM - Enabled

Boot Device Control was on UEFI only which I now changed to UEFI and Legacy OPROM

and Boot from Network / Storage Devices /PCI-E Expansion Devices are Legacy Only

 

So I assume it's enabled and it's still not booting to the SSD

I really don't know at this point, it should just let you shrink the partition to create an EFI partition. Good luck, though I'd probably just do the full reinstall at this point. Sorry for not being able to help more. 

[Tetoris]

18 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

I really don't know at this point, it should just let you shrink the partition to create an EFI partition. Good luck, though I'd probably just do the full reinstall at this point. Sorry for not being able to help more. 

Yeah don't worry, since I have all my files it should be fine. Thanks for taking the time to help me out I really appreciate it!