Windows 11 EFI partition missing

[JollyJamma]

Hi all

 

I I need help - I had a multi boot setup and decided to use the one SSD to test TrueNAS out and unfortunately it had the EFI partition for my Windows 11 as well as the Ubuntu install on it. 
 

I booted into another copy of Ubuntu I had on a spare SSD that I use for playing around with WINE and pentesting and so on and managed to resize the Windows 11 partition and manually create a partition for EFI. 

 

Does anyone here know how to manually create the EFI partition with files to all it to BOOT? 
 

Maybe I could use EasyBCD or Clover? 
 

It might work if I manually add the Hackintosh EFI files to it but I’m unsure as to if that’s even possible. 
 

I should have disconnected all of my OS drives before installing Windows 11 but it’s an ITX machine so a massive pain to take apart and put back together again. 
 

Thanks in advance 

[g0ated]

I wonder if you can create a small windows install somewhere, chroot into the efi partition of that new install from a live linux usb, copy that efi file and place it in the efi folder you had created earlier? Actually an even faster way would be to download a windows 11 iso and navigate to the \EFI\Microsoft directory copy .efi file and do the copy paste thing I said earlier. I don't think using clover or a bootloader is going to help since those manger/loaders have to locate for the .efi file for windows which you lack. Your hackintosh efi file can be placed their too but not in the same directory as windows if my memory serves me right...  

[JollyJamma]

38 minutes ago, goatedpenguin said:

I wonder if you can create a small windows install somewhere, chroot into the efi partition of that new install from a live linux usb, copy that efi file and place it in the efi folder you had created earlier? Actually an even faster way would be to download a windows 11 iso and navigate to the \EFI\Microsoft directory copy .efi file and do the copy paste thing I said earlier. I don't think using clover or a bootloader is going to help since those manger/loaders have to locate for the .efi file for windows which you lack. Your hackintosh efi file can be placed their too but not in the same directory as windows if my memory serves me right...  

Thank you. I'll try that and get back to this thread if it worked. 

 

I tried to use a Win 11 USB installer and follow the automatic repair process and that failed. I'll try get the EFI off the directory and put the files into the EFI partition in Linux. 

 

I don't have a Hackintosh installed on that system any more as it was a pain and I wanted to play around with various Linux distros but I could do a quick Hackintosh just to fix this issue. 

 

I do wish that Asus had added the functionality of being able to disable HDDs in the BIOS to avoid this issue in the first place. The system has 3 SSDs/HDDs just hanging out in a mess because I wanted to add and remove drives easily. I'll get a mATX system next time and use that to play around with as it's far less of a pain and would allow me to add an M.2 riser card too. 

[JollyJamma]

I found this app in the Chris Titus Win util https://www.easyuefi.com/

[JollyJamma]

None of the above helped. 
 

im going to remove all of the drives and reinstall.

 

I did try creating the EFI partition at the start of the drive and manually copying over the EFI files but it didn’t help.

 

i also tried running the rebuild commands in the Windows 11 installer recovery mode but nothing.

 

pity, I’d just reinstalled and everything was nice with all of my settings done. 
 

Thanks for the suggestion 

[g0ated]

Damn man well at least you learnt it the hardway. Perhaps if this happens again you can make a extra copy of the whole efi partion which is pretty small so that you can recover from such a loss. You do know that getting all your important data was possible by chrooting into the drives right? I guess you did that

[JollyJamma]

1 hour ago, goatedpenguin said:

Damn man well at least you learnt it the hardway. Perhaps if this happens again you can make an extra copy of the whole efi partion which is pretty small so that you can recover from such a loss. You do know that getting all your important data was possible by chrooting into the drives right? I guess you did that

 I did not know that. Been a while since I’ve needed to use chroot.
 

I’m not too worried. 
 

I have very little data on the C drive and all of my data backed up across other drives, all of which are accessible by my linux install.

 

I wish Windows was less dumb. It doesn’t ask you if it should use the other EFI partition, it just goes ahead.