In this article we’ll show how to manually repair accidentally deleted Windows boot partition on UEFI system. Initially, the article described my experience with restoring the boot EFI partition on Windows 7, but the article is also relevant for modern Microsoft operating systems (from Windows 7 to Windows 10). This article often helped me after accidentally formatting or deleting the EFI partition on Windows 10. I’ll show you an easy way to manually rebuild the boot EFI and MSR partitions on Windows.
Suppose that the EFI boot partition on your UEFI (non-BIOS) system was accidentally deleted or formatted (for example, when you tried to remove OEM recovery partition), and as a result Windows 10 (8.1 / 7) doesn’t boot constantly offering to select the boot device (Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected). Is it possible to restore the Windows performance when removing the Boot Manager partition without reinstalling the system?
GPT Partition Structure
Consider how the partition table on the bootable hard disk with GUID partition table (GPT) on the UEFI system should look like. You should have at least the following partitions:
- EFI System Partition or ESP (Extensible Firmware Interface) — 100 MB (partition type — EFI).
- Microsoft Reserved partition — 128 MB (partition type — MSR).
- Primary Windows partition (the partition containing Windows).
This is the minimum configuration. These partitions are created by the Windows Installer when you install the system on an unformatted disk. Computer manufacturers or users can create their own partitions containing, for example, Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) in the winre.wim file, a partition with the system image backup provided by the manufacturer (allows to roll back to the default state of the system), user partitions, etc.
The EFI partition with the FAT32 file system is a mandatory partition on GPT disks on UEFI systems. This partition, similar to the System Reserved partition on drives with MFT partition table, stores the boot configuration store (BCD) and a number of files needed for Windows boot. When the computer boots, the UEFI environment loads the bootloader (EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi) from the EFI (ESP) partition and transfers control to it. If this partition is deleted, Windows can’t boot correctly.
The MSR partition on the GPT disk is used to simplify partition management and is used for service operations (for example, when converting a disk from simple to dynamic). This is a backup partition that does not have a partition code assigned. This partition can’t store user data. In Windows 10, the size of the MSR partition is only 16 MB (in Windows 8.1 the size of the MSR partition is 128 MB), the file system is NTFS.
How to Manually Create EFI and MSR partition on GPT-based HDD
Since the system doesn’t boot correctly, we’ll need Windows installation disk with Windows 10 (Win 8 or 7) or any other boot disk. Boot from the installation media and on the first installation screen press Shift+F10. The command prompt window opens.
Run the disk and partition management utility:
Diskpart |
Display the list of hard disks in the system (in our example, there is only one disk, disk 0. The asterisk in the GPT column means that it uses the GUID partition table).
list disk |
Select this disk:
Select disk 0 |
Display the list of partitions on this disk:
List partition |
In our example, only two partitions are left in the system:
- MSR partition — 128 MB;
- Windows system partition — 9 GB.
As you can see, the EFI partition is missing (it has been deleted).
Our task is to remove the remaining MSR partition so that we have at least 228 MB of unallocated space on the drive (for MSR and EFI partitions). You can remove this partition using the graphical Gparted or directly from the command prompt (we’ll choose the last variant).
Select the partition to remove:
Select partition 1 |
And delete it
Delete partition override |
Make sure that there is only Windows partition left:
List partition |
Now you can re-create EFI and MSR partitions manually. To do it, run these commands in diskpart context one by one.
Select the disk:
select disk 0 create partition efi size=100 |
Make sure that the 100 MB partition (an asterisk in front of the Partition 1) is selected:
list partition select partition 1 format quick fs=fat32 label="System" assign letter=G create partition msr size=128 list partition list vol |
In our case, disk letter C: is already assigned to our Windows partition. Otherwise, assign the drive letter to it as follows:
select vol 1 assign letter=C exit |
Repairing EFI bootloader and Windows BCD
After you have created a minimal disk partition structure for the UEFI system, you can proceed to copy the EFI boot files to the disk and create a bootloader configuration file (BCD).
Copy the EFI environment files from the directory of the installed Windows 10:
mkdir G:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot xcopy /s C:\Windows\Boot\EFI\*.* G:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot |
Let’s re-create the Windows 10 / 7 bootloader configuration:
g: cd EFI\Microsoft\Boot bcdedit /createstore BCD bcdedit /store BCD /create {bootmgr} /d “Windows Boot Manager” bcdedit /store BCD /create /d “My Windows 10” /application osloader |
You can replace the caption “My Windows 10” for any other.
The command returns the GUID of the created record, in the next command put this GUID instead of {your_guid}.
bcdedit /store BCD /set {bootmgr} default {your_guid} bcdedit /store BCD /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi bcdedit /store BCD /set {bootmgr} displayorder {default} |
The following commands are run in the {default} context:
bcdedit /store BCD /set {default} device partition=c: bcdedit /store BCD /set {default} osdevice partition=c: bcdedit /store BCD /set {default} path \Windows\System32\winload.efi bcdedit /store BCD /set {default} systemroot \Windows exit |
Restart your computer… In our case it didn’t boot from the first time. Try the following:
- Turn your PC off.
- Unplug your hard drive.
- Turn your PC on, wait till the boot error window appears and turn it off again.
- Plug your disk.
Then in our case (the test took place on the VMWare virtual machine with UEFI system) we had to add a new item to the boot menu by selecting EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgrfw.efi on the EFI partition.
In some UEFI menus, by analogy, you need to change the priority of the boot partitions.
After all these actions, your Windows should boot correctly.
90 comments
Thank you very much!!!!!! Thats the only solution for me in the entire internet!!!!
I’m on a laptop. It didn’t work. The last step is difficult because my screen is broke so I don’t know where or how I can select it.
I’ve been viewing my screen on linux via my tv. I need windows 10 unfortunately. I think I’m screwed. I’ll have to save up for a new version because i can’t find the product key as chntpw doesn’t work. I have a dying iphone and that’s it. I’m struggking with health issues and only just got myself together to do this. I’m saddened. It’s my fault for accidentally deleting the bootloader in the 1st place (archlinux accident).
I tried my best and I learned something though. So thanks for the educational experience.
Fantastic, after hours of fannying around with various other “how to” guides, this is THE one that WORKED!! Fixed SSD after Windows update somehow wiped the boot sector. Many, many thanks
Usually I almost never comment on guides, but this time, you just saved my Windows! It was very detailed, telling you each and every step you have to take. I was installing Arch and I accidentally formatted my EFI partition of Windows 10. I used up the whole day trying to find out how to fix this, and after I almost gave up, I saw your article, followed it and it worked like a charm!
Thank you so much for the help, and please keep making guides like these
You are welcome 🙂
Thank you very much!!! This saved me a lot of time, because a reinstall isn’t necessary anymore!
This is also working perfect for Win10.
Thanks man!
I’ve moved partitions from mbr to gpt (from 500GB to 3TB hard drive) and needed to recreate UEFI/GPT boot partitions – only way that worked for me (just leave some space at the beginning of drive).
Just thinking if I just create those two partitions and xcopy files to boot partition, won’t it be enought to run “startup” repair from Windows 7/8 cd and just remove that bcdedit hassle?
I’ll check it next time I will have those problems. Thanks again!
Hi, and thanks for your patience in writing such a detailed solution. I’ve messed up my UEFI Win 10 partition when migraating to a SSD disk and trying to restore dual boot. To make short a long story, I decided to delet and rebuild UEFI partition, and I’ve got stuck at the copying files step. Whenever I try to use the {xcopy /s C:\Windows\Boot\EFI\*.* G:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot} command, I receive a message like “failure to copy files from source”. Everytime. This is driving me crazy. The files are there, I can see them, but I just can’t copy them. Any thoughts will be appreciated. Thanks again.
Jal_lah, if you’re still having trouble, you could try creating a Linux live CD or USB and boot into it. You can then mount both the EFI partition and your Windows partition, and copy the files over.
Thank you for the detailed guide! Exactly what I’m looking for. Do you know if there are any differences for applying this guide to restoring a Windows 10 EFI partition? Can I just replace the third ‘bcdedit’ command with the following?
bcdedit /store BCD /create /d “Windows 10” /application osloader
Any help would be appreciated!
I myself had to restore a Windows 10 UEFI partition and had no issues with changing the “Windows 7” part to “Windows 10”.
As far as I can tell, it’s really just a label so what goes in the quotes probably doesn’t matter too much.
After a few days of frustration, I’m happy to say this guide finally resolved the issue. I had 2 UEFI partitions, 4 recovery partitions, and then 2 partitions for my OSes (Win10 and Ubuntu). After messing around with getting rid of grub and returning the partition space back to windows, I ended up screwing up my entire boot.
And after about 2 days of scouring the internet and trying all solutions available, this is thankfully the first one that got me back to a usable system. Great thanks to the writer(s) of this article for getting me out of a bind.
Thanks for the detailed and thorough description of the recovery process.
In the case of a dual boot system, with Windows 7 and Fedora (installed on a newly added hard disk), and where only the Windows 7 boot is failing, would there be any concerns with following this method to recover the Windows 7 EFI boot partition?
Thank you very much!
A restored the win10 Pro boot after installing ubuntu and accidentally deleting the Windows Boot Manager partition.
Thanks a lot for this guide, saved my day!
hey man its really helpfull thank you so much for sharing this at least it show me a efi disk but after applying delete Partition override cmnd i get an error saying “virtual disk server error” and delete is not allowed on current boot, system.pagefile crashdamp or hibernation volume ……can i get a solution for that please thanks in advance <3
A big thank you! Your write-up saved me this weekend. HP Workstation Z440, shrank windows partition and tried with Acronis True Image (comes free with new SSD Crucial MX300) to clone HDD to SSD. But upon reboot nothing, no OS can be found. Your method saved me.
One point. If the windows partition does not extend to the end, then upon remaking EFI and MSR partitions, they are placed after the windows partition which I am not sure if it would work. One has to add the OFFSET flag to create partition. For MSR the offset should be 101*1024 = 103424.
Hope this is helpful to someone else…
I accidentally nuked the MSR & EFI partitions on a notebook I brought home to help a friend fix over St. Patrick’s weekend. Almost gave up on a startup repair versus a wipe and reload after countless hours on the internet before stumbling on your site.
My feedback based on your prescribed solution boils down to five words: Meticulous Guide with Amazing Results.
Thank You so much bro
I impressed and I love you so much
I don’t know how can I thank you
Thank you so much, very informative and helpful.
Also works for Win10 if you stop at the boot loader instruction and then follow http://woshub.com/how-to-repair-uefi-bootloader-in-windows-8/
This was amazing. I didn’t believe it could help, but you’re genious. This realy save my day.
Awsome…!!!! Work very well Thank You… Detail Solution…!!!!
God would bless you for this fix saved me a lot of time I just had to convert to gpt before creating efi
Feel unbelievable happy right now. You know what you are doing. Thanks a lot, will have some good sleep now.
Thanks a lot.
You sir, just saved my butt. Week before exams, all my papers are almost done and windows decided to shit the bed tonight. I had everything backed up to my server but it was all compressed and would take too much effort to reinstall everything to my laptop. Excellent explanations and the only thing I can add to this guide is that everything has to be in order, it most likely will not move on if you try something too early (I missed the creation of the {bootmgr} and it took me a bit to trace my steps). Thank you so much!
Can i do this from another PC ?
Oh my God! You saved sooo much headache and worry!! Thank you so much! I deleted the EFI partition on my computer 2 times and both times, your article came to the rescue!
Thank you very much. It’s work!
thank you so much…..thankyou thank you….
Wow thank you man, you rock!!!
Worked perfectly. Best guide in the world. Thank you.
Well, one thing doesn’t seem to work. The computer won’t shutdown properly and will just go to the sign out screen instead. Oh well.
Amazing guide, the only one I could find that worked. It’s a life saver, nothing in the install CD was working (couldn’t repair because of mismatched version) but opening the command line and rebuilding the boot from scratch is genius
Thank you!
Thank you for this. I removed a Ubuntu installation off of one of my secondary drives and for some reason windows didnt have an efi partition or even room for one. I had to shrink my boot drive before doing this. Thhhhannnkkkkk you so much for this easy to follow tutorial! One extra step I had to do. I had to do start up repair as it said originally something was messed up on the efi partiition I created and that fixed that issue.
Thank you.. Saved my day!
Thanks ! Your guide worked 🙂
PS: Instead of removing the hard disk , you can also force UEFI device detection by turning off the UEFI boot mode in your bios and rebooting it.
On the first boot it will say no boot devices found.
Then reboot again and enable UEFI, save settings and try again. This time your PC should redetect the new UEFI sector.
..At least it worked for me.. I was using a Intel Hades Canyon NUC.
All I can say is THANK YOU!
Thank you! Works perfectly!
Thank you! And google search leading to this article.
Fixed a windows 7 and now it boots.
Someone said in the earlier comments, “I don’t typically comment on guides”. Well I am usually the same. All I can say is THANK YOU!!! You just saved me rebuilding a domain controller after the backup failed to restore the EFI partition correctly. Awesome!
Thank you! You save my data with this tutorial!
I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 1903, but after install everything i need to work, my boot partition doesn’t appears on BIOS settings.
Following entire steps above, i restore the EFI partition and voila! Windows boot again!
Thank you Guy!
This is the only one right solution in whole internet when it comes to this EFI. Awesome
God bless you. You have just saved me a lot of time and also my data because i was planning to reinstall my windows. I think this solution you have provided is the only one i could find in the internet except from reinstalling your windows. Thank you so much.
Great writeup! One of my coworkers borked his Windows 10 install beyond repair and all he had left was the naked VHDX file from a recent Windows Image backup he took a few days ago.
I created a naked HyperV VM, attached the VHDX and using your howto, was able to boot into his Windows 10 installation successfully.
Thanks alot!
You are a super star!! That saved my hair and my sanity!.
Hi I just went thru days trying to switch a 500 gig SSD drive to a Larger one. Clone copy, well apparently clone the Windows 10 OS, but not the EFI partition. I then went back to the small to try and salvage the mistake and it ran out of disk space trying to fix my the EFI issue. It snowballed from there and I ended up here. I was fooled a bit when you took those 2 dos command windows and combined them. lol. I just kept comparing and realized what you did. I like to add that at the end you had a couple problems booting and had to disconnect a drive and restart and then add a EFI boot line. This is confusing to me since I am not clear about why, but I am just about ready to restart the system that I used your great tutorial and crossing fingers. Everything went perfect entering commands with not one error. Thank You for taking the time to create this post and letting it remain in public. †
Not all heroes wear capes
Thanks for this guide. Finally someone who can provide solution with proper explanation. All other guides are just a bunch of console commands without any justification why we’re using them.
Thanks so much! This guide was literally the only one that helped me, because I accidentally deleted my EFI while hackintoshing D:
Dude you saved my ass big time. This was THE only solution on the whole internet i could find. Thats what i get for trying a dua boot windows 10/kali dual boot. note to self: DONT DUAL BOOT GET A SEPARATE DRIVE (yes im yelling at myself)
Awesome it worked perfectly for windows 10 without a single problem…Thanks you so much.
I love you. Thank you soooo much.
Thank you so much! It worked perfectly!
Thousand thanks!
I worked charms. Great tutorial =)
I was totally worried after accidentally deleting my boot files. Hats off to you for creating such a precise and simple guide with screenshots! You have saved my time and data bro. Kudos & Cheers to you!
best guide for EFI / GPT / Win corrupted bootloader ever! Thank you very much. I am doing for ages the PC repairs with MBR – classic BIOS but this is kinda new to me. When my favourite bootrec.exe /fixboot says acess denied it started to be funny. Also the command “bootsect/nt60 sys” saves lives but that did not helped me. I´ve done stupid thing. I make space on my drive. (EFI,MSR.Win, space, recovery) the HDD was bitlocker encrypted and I let linux mint to do automatic intall to the empty space. It was ok. Then nothing booted and all my traditional skills using gparted, windows recovery cmd went to dead end. Only this restored my Win. Now about to add Linux boot line. And thats it.
Thank you once more!
Fantastic guide!!! Saved my day.
Than you so much my bro!Tou helped me to restore my windows.God bless u man
THANKS
Thank you very much
Thank you for the detailed guide it helped me fix my boot problem which occurred after I cloned my drive to an SSD with clonezilla but then booted with both drives in the machine not work sure what step it was but somehow the EFI partition got messed up. I tried many things but this is the only guide that worked. I really appreciate you making the information available. John F.
Wondering to know, what about using bcdboot command, it is look simpler than bcdedit ?! Is bcdboot can used too in this case ?
Do you have article about it ?
You are my hero, thank you!!!!
Great job with the document! I had one such a PC with a broken EFI partition due an interrupted Ubuntu installation. This was the only guide that helped me get the whole thing back to life. That’s some good info on the GPT partition table structure but I managed to get my PC running without the MSR partition.
Thanks and you guys rock!
The best guide on the internet ever!!! It saved my PC!!
Woaw my hero.
Very good guide well detailed and solve mostly every boot errors
Sorry I replied to someone with this but can’t delete it. Repeat it here. I’m on a laptop. It didn’t work. The last step is difficult because my screen is broke so I don’t know where or how I can select it.
I’ve been viewing my screen on linux via my tv. I need windows 10 unfortunately. I think I’m screwed. I’ll have to save up for a new version because i can’t find the product key as chntpw doesn’t work. I have a dying iphone and that’s it. I’m struggking with health issues and only just got myself together to do this. I’m saddened. It’s my fault for accidentally deleting the bootloader in the 1st place (archlinux accident).
I tried my best and I learned something though. So thanks for the educational experience.
I can’t find my boot options.
Gah I used to be good at IT.
Hope you can help with this boot options part and where I can find it. I’m on a HP Pavillion. I’d have to pay for recovery software and I’m broke. Please help. I’m at my wits end.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH! YOU SAVED MY DAY!
I was trying to install archlinux as second OS but it turned out to messing up with some windows partitions. After about 10 hours I found this amazing guide that saved my laptop. You were very, very helpful!
Why is there a x:\Sources> before the mkdir G:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot in the console when we are supposed to type only mkdir G:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot at that step?
Thank you, you saved my pc!
Thank you very much, you save me from reinstalling windows 10, best regards from Croatia.
PLEASE PLEASE HELP! I’ve change id of (set id =…) of FAT32 partition which was successful and did exit. But now I can’t see FAT32 in my volume list, what to do please??! I really really need help! How can I bring it back to the list?
I think it will be easier for you to recreate the EFI partiotion from scratch according to this guide.
Thanks for the guide! This helped me successfully recreate my EFI partition for Windows 10.
I installed Windows 10 education on a new SSD, but the EFI partition was not created on it during install due to it already existing on my old SSD with the previous Windows 10 installation! When I formatted the old SSD and installed Linux, the partition with Windows boot loader was obviously deleted.
In my case, I was only missing the 100 MB EFI partition. I did not need to create the 16 MB MSR partition, it was already there. Before creating the EFI partition I had to shrink down the primary volume. Select the primary volume and shrink desired=100.
I also had 2 SSD and 1 HDD, and diskpart labeled my drives differently than what I expected. My C: drive on Windows was represented as volume D in diskpart, my E: drive represented as C, so it was confusing to identify the correct one for the bcdedit commands. Once I did, everything worked flawlessly.
I was hoping this would work. I followed the direction but still no luck. The only thing I didn’t do was disconnect my harddrive. I was hoping I didn’t have to. I have two hardrives and I can’t disconnect one of them. HDD2. I put all of my BIOS settings back to how they originally were but I saw in the boot configuration page that their are two windows boot drives that I can choose. when I reboot I get the 0000255 error code. I’m gonna try the disconnect the harddrive option and see what happens. I gotta be doing something wrong on my end. Any advice?
Forgot to click on the notify followup option below so I’m leaving another comment.
Anyone stuvk at mkdir not pivking up the line, just close cmd and reopen. As you can see it has X:/ in front
Great stuff. Works fantastically after I spent days trying to fix my laptop.
Still relevant. Took me back to my DOS days lol..thanks
Great Stuff. Works superb
This saved my laptop! Thanks a million!
Great Mister, Thank you so much.
You’ve saved me
Thanks a Million!
I worked. This is a real guide with reference image.
Wow!
Thank you very much!!!
Thank you 1000%!
While partitioning my computer when I was installing linux for a dual boot, I formatted /dev/sda1, the windows EFI partition, instead of /dev/sda8. Thanks for this amazing guide!
I recently did an update on a windows 10 computer which multi-booted with a bunch of Linux distributions, and for reasons I am still trying to figure out, I lost access every OS except Manjaro, Mint and Zorin. I spent the last week or so wondering how I was going to re-create my efi partitions (which I messed up reinstalling grub2) in order to access my windows installations and then I happened on this article. Whew!! Thank you!! :).
Thank you so much. Very concise instructions really saved me!
Thanks a lot…