Did you try to dual-boot your Windows 10 system with a Linux distro and you lost your EFI partition?
In this tutorial, you will learn the ultimate fix to repair the EFI partition and gain your Windows 10 boot back.
Let’s dive in!
Fix EFI Partition Like a Boss Using Windows 10 USB Drive
1. Create Your Windows 10 Bootable USB Drive
For this tutorial, we are going to need a bootable USB drive with Windows 10 in it.
If you don’t have the ISO of Windows 10, you can get it legally for free by following this tutorial: Download The Official Windows 10 ISO Legally
After you download your ISO of Windows 10 burn it into your USB drive using Rufus by following this tutorial: How to Create a Bootable USB Drive of Windows 10
Now you will need to boot into your USB drive, the key to access your boot devices is different for each manufacturer.
Just google “your PC’s brand” + “boot usb drive” and you will find the key to boot into your Windows 10 USB drive.
Now that you have known how to create a bootable Windows 10 USB drive and you know how to boot into it let’s get started.
2. Fix EFI Partition
When you boot to your USB drive you will be asked to press a key, press any key to boot from the USB drive.
Choose the keyboard language/layout and click “Next“.
Click on “Repair your computer“.
Click on “Troubleshoot“.
Click on “Command Prompt“.
Click on your user account.
Enter the password if any, click “Continue“.
Now to find the System partition which has the EFI boot files in it.
To do this execute the following commands:
diskpart list disk select disk 0 list partition
Now we need to assign a letter for the EFI partition to manipulate it using other tools and to fix its boot records.
Do these commands, change number “1” to the System partition number, leave the letter as “S” as it’s simple to understand.
select partition 1 assign letter=S exit
Now we need to check the content of the EFI partition, then we will be formatting it.
Do these commands:
s: dir format S: /FS:FAT32 Y Y System
Now we need to find the letter of the Windows partition, for this we are going to use diskpart again:
diskpart list volume exit
The Windows partition is usually the largest, having the NTFS file system and is usually either D or C.
Now let’s check the content of the Windows partition and link it with the EFI partition.
Do the following commands (keep note S: is the EFI partition and C: in my case is the Windows partition):
c: dir bcdboot c:\windows /s s: /f UEFI s: dir exit
Click “Continue” (Exit and continue to Windows 10)
Our system boots perfectly again! Thanks to Easytutorial.com!!
If this worked please leave a thank you message below
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If you have any questions about Windows 10 and partitions don’t forget to leave a comment.
Your tutorial is perfect. It fixed boot loop issue for a Surface Pro and I used a bootable USB with Windows 10 image to do the job. Thank you so much
Your tutorial saved my life, more exactly the life of my operating system and it works like a charm on windows 11, but in my case I had to carry out a previous step, create an EFI partition, because the “System” partition did not existed, then in fact I applied your tutorial and everything worked correctly, my computer starts again without problems.
Thank you very much sir