Two EFI partitions, one broken, one fixed; Can replace or salvage the old one with the new one?

Question

I have a Windows system disk that looks like this:

The first EFI partition broke when I tried to get this cloned version to boot. The second EFI partition was created in my attempt to salvage both the original and the new drive. Only the situation you see above survived; it exists on both the original and the cloned drive. I wish to extend C: into the unallocated space, but the second EFI partition appears to be blocking it.

It's a dual boot system with Ubuntu. Each OS has its own physical SSD. I fixed GRUB2 with boot-repair in Ubuntu, and it shows entries for both EFI partitions on the Windows drive.

How can I fix the first EFI partition and remove the second? Thank you.

Answer 1

Your partition is only 99MB, so why extending? Also one problem is, that one EFI partition is 99MB and the other is 100MB. To overwrite one with the other they must be the same size.

There is many thinks you can do, but please backup your data before doing anything.

To clone partition, a space should be free and the same size. You can use disk or gparted utility in Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install gparted

You'll have to delete broken EFI partition and move Healthy EFI and Win partition for 1MB to the right get 100MB of free space. I usually do this process slowly with many restarts and tests if everything is OK. After this step it is a good time to test if both of the systems are still working.

Now you have to copy Healthy EFI partition to an empty space.

Please check those links:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MovingLinuxPartition

https://itectec.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-uefi-boot-fails-when-cloning-image-to-new-machine/

https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2458861.html

I'm not quite sure on procedure here but you might have to point it in BIOS as well.

BACKUP DATA before doing anything!

Answer 2

99 MB is nothing and isn't worth taking chances with your disk.

You will need to do some heavy manipulations in order to delete the partition, then move C: over it, then extend C: over it. Any error will cause you to lose the disk, meaning make it unbootable.

The end result would be ... almost no change in the size of C:, since 99 MB is not enough to make any difference.