Which tool to recover the EFI partition? Booted into Rescue Disk

dictum said:

I have all my data available on the primary boot SSD and the clone SSD I used for backups got wiped out.

Then it sounds like you have a spare SSD to do a clean install of Windows 10 to.

So there are no operating system backup folders and files........just data partition?
No registry folders? sam, security, software, system, regback, etc.?

Still no boot, same blue screen.

There is something misconfigured in the EFI/bootloader/bcd - something is off.

The reason I think that is because the program that damaged this, it overwrote the EFI partition. It didn't touch anything else anywhere.

zbook said:

So there are no operating system backup folders and files........just data partition?
No registry folders? SAM SECURITY etc?

'

Correct

Do you need to backup any important files or are all files adequately backed up?

Install Windows 10 to the spare SSD. That will give you a fresh EFI system partition created from scratch. Then you can attempt to add your damaged Windows 10 that won't boot to the boot menu and set up dual booting. Pretty much guaranteed not to work, though, as there is something messed up in your Windows\System32 folder, not your EFI partition. But worth a try.

NavyLCDR said:

Then it sounds like you have a spare SSD to do a clean install of Windows 10 to.

I have two identical SSDs, one has that damaged C: drive, all the stuff minus the boot partition and the other is pretty much empty I can use for a new install.

If I installed Windows 10 on that empty drive, would it be any easier to recover the other, the damaged SSD? Versus this 'rescue disk' I have.

For example: Let's say I do a clean install of Win10. Can I just clone the EFI partition it will create from this new install to the broken disk?

Then we should know right away if that's an issue with EFI or with something else.

Is that a viable plan?

zbook said:

Do you need to backup any important files or are all files adequately backed up?

I have access to all my critical files in Documents and such. The operating system I don't.

dictum said:

I have two identical SSDs, one has that damaged C: drive, all the stuff minus the boot partition and the other is pretty much empty I can use for a new install.

If I installed Windows 10 on that empty drive, would it be any easier to recover the other, the damaged SSD? Versus this 'rescue disk' I have.

For example: Let's say I do a clean install of Win10. Can I just clone the EFI partition it will create from this new install to the broken disk?

Then we should know right away if that's an issue with EFI or with something else.

Yep. Read my post just before the quote

NavyLCDR said:

Install Windows 10 to the spare SSD. That will give you a fresh EFI system partition created from scratch. Then you can attempt to add your damaged Windows 10 that won't boot to the boot menu and set up dual booting. Pretty much guaranteed not to work, though, as there is something messed up in your Windows\System32 folder, not your EFI partition. But worth a try.

I understand your point even though I am not convinced at this point.

But even if that's the case, why can't I just copy the entire Windows\System32 folder from the new install to the broken install?