safe to delete EFI system partition (win7) on old drive after cloning?

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a while back I cloned my old installation of win7 from my HDD to a new SSD using the tools provided by Samsung (if I remember correctly). I know I should have done a clean new install, but that's not the issue ;) Afterwards I changed the drive letters (which required a huge amount of research and some fiddling with the registry, but that might have been an error on my side, moving to fast), so that the SSD is my new C:\ and the HDD got to be K:\

The old drive is still in my computer, but it's no longer being used. When trying to set up a regular backup to the old HDD (which I should have done a while back, I know), windows told me the drive contained the windows recovery environment. From my understanding the Windows RE is in the EFI System Partition, right? My partition manager shows an ESP on both the SSD and the HDD, both 100 MB in size. I'm guessing it got cloned, too, but I'm not sure.

The question now is: I it safe to delete the old ESP on the HDD, or could that result in loosing the windows RE or worse?

Urinprobe

Posted 2014-10-18T13:56:36.993

Reputation: 91

You can always change drive letter in Disk Management. No need for any hacks, it’s an official feature. – Daniel B – 2014-10-18T14:00:25.963

well, I changed C: to be K:, to free up the letter for the new SSD, but that required a reboot. When rebooting I had no drive called C:, so it got bad... :) – Urinprobe – 2014-10-18T14:08:30.110

The WindowsRE partition, and the ESP are not the same thing, not that it should matter for your purposes. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825702.aspx

– Robin Hood – 2014-10-18T18:19:31.660

Answers

2

I think you'll be fine to delete the 100 MB partition on your Hard disk, which holds the K: drive.

However, in order to make sure, I would go about it this way:

  1. Shut down the PC. Unplug the power cable after it shuts down
  2. Open the case, and then unplug your HDD, which holds the K: drive so that only your SSD is connected to the system
  3. Reconnect power cable, then reboot to confirm that the PC can boot from the SSD without having access to the ESP on the HDD
  4. Upon confirming that you can boot without the HDD connected, you should now have provided yourself with proof that it is safe to remove the 100MB partition from the HDD.
  5. (Optional) After removing the partition on the HDD, you can now expand the remaining partition to use some of the 100MB that you have freed up. Obviously this will remove the option to boot from the HDD, but this is probably already the case, as I assume you have removed the Windows installation from this disk.

And yes, the partition will have gotten moved over from the HDD to the SSD as part of the cloning process.

Hope this helps!

Edit: further reading about the ESP and how to remove it is available here

Kristian

Posted 2014-10-18T13:56:36.993

Reputation: 2 982

The NOTE part of your answer is nonsense. The unpartitioned space on the disk CAN'T be used by the FAT as that resides INSIDE a partition. Please remove it from your otherwise excellent answer. – Tonny – 2014-10-18T14:46:54.763

Thank you for your great answer! Just one more thing: I know that I can boot without K: being connected. But will I have access to the Windows RE, too? – Urinprobe – 2014-10-18T14:47:12.477

@Urinprobe In short: YES: It will use the cloned copy on the SSD. – Tonny – 2014-10-18T14:49:17.813

@Tonny - I have removed my note as per your comment. Thank you for the clarification. I will have to research that as the information comes from an otherwise trustworthy colleague. – Kristian – 2014-10-18T14:57:26.980

Asked: 2014-10-18T13:56:36.993

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Active: 2014-10-18T14:55:26.050