Desired Outcome:
A disk with only the EFI partition and the rest as Unallocated space
Actions to be taken:
- Boot to MR Rescue Media.
- Restore only EFI partition.
Will that give me the desired result?
This disk will be then used to clean install Windows (by booting to the Windows Installation media) and the three required partitions (MSR, Windows and Recovery) will be created during installation from a diskpart script.
Yes, you can do that, but the EFI System Partition that is restored from the Macrium Reflect backup will not have a valid BCD to boot the new Windows 10 installation from. What is the goal here?
The goal is to clean install Windows using the Windows Installation media, without deleting the EFI partition which contains hp installed stuff (i.e. hp Diagnostics (run when we press F2 at boot) and data used for BIOS updates).
This can be done, using Minitool Partition Wizard, as can be seen here and the question is if the same result can be achieved with a simple restore of the EFI partition, with Macrium Reflect.
Well, I would say try it and see what you get. Personally, I would do a clean install in the standard way. Delete every partition off the drive and do the clean install to a blank, completely 100% unallocated drive (after you make your image backup of the existing partitions first, of course). If the EFI system partition created by Windows setup does not behave the way you want it to, then you can replace with the one from your backup image and you will just have to adjust the BCD entry for Windows by either running the utility provided by Macrium Reflect rescue drive to fix Windows boot problems, or by manually running a bcdboot command yourself.
HP Diagnostics should not be running from the EFI system partition anyway, that should be a function of the UEFI firmware.
Thanks a lot, for your time Commander!
I think I'll stick to the working solution.
I just wanted to see if the same result could be achieved with MR, without having to go to the trouble of testing.
The reason for creating this thread was to check if someone from our experts had done it and had the answer!
Regarding the HP Diagnostics, it's an HP choice, not mine!
So either way, whether you leave the current EFI system partition in place, whether you restore the EFI system partition first, then do the clean install, or whether you do the clean install and then restore the EFI system partition from the backup you are still going to have to update the BCD to reflect the new partition that Windows 10 is installed to.
There also may be a utility provided by HP that will restore the diagnostics menu item to the boot menu.
Correct!!!
Even if there is one, I don't have it.
And besides, from what you can see from the screenshot, that's where they also keep the BIOS update files. Sometime ago, they were creating their own Recovery partition (besides the Windows one) to keep that stuff. Now they have moved them to the EFI... go figure!
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