UEFI/GPT Windows 10 fresh install, some questions on diskpart and ESP

paul black said:

excellent help and detailed reply for the op @navylcdr. I did try to give you a rep, but i need to spread it around a bit [ i put reminder in my notebook ].

thanks!

FWIW, I recently did something very similar to what NavyLCDR first advised in this thread. I was upgrading a 256 GB NVME drive in my laptop to a 1TB drive, so I backed up the original drive with Acronis True Image, then formatted the new drive into two partitions, the first was 256 GB and the second was about 700 GB after formatting, then tried to restore the backed up drive into the 256 GB partition. It didn't work, because of the two partitions. So I reinitialized the drive, left it unpartitioned, and installed the backup copy onto it, which worked fine. Then, after booting into Windows, I used Control Panel/Computer Management to shrink the C drive back down to 256 GB, then created a second partition in the unused space, named it the "D" drive, and used it for storage of my documents, pictures, music, and software. This way, when I back up my boot drive, it's a smaller backup, and if something crashes my Windows setup, it shouldn't take out my files on the D drive. Also, most consumer-grade laptops don't have a slot available for a second internal drive, and this is a way to work around that limitation.

AlanRC said:

Also, most consumer-grade laptops don't have a slot available for a second internal drive, and this is a way to work around that limitation.

Luckily in my case the laptop will have an additional SSD slot that I will use to install games via Steam so any time I need to reinstall Windows(if any), the Steam App will go back to c:\ but no need to re-download games from scratch.

But listen, I came here expecting a few tips here and there but never would I have expected such a detailed step-by-step guide like the one NavyLCDR provided, this is what I love about these communities, how incredibly helpful and kind people can be to each other.

I'm certainly looking forward to following his guide when the machine arrives :)

@NavyLCDR, just to say that even though I'm yet to perform this, yesterday I decided to do a proof of concept on an old laptop I call the "guinea pig", I extended the drive, applied the image via dism, added the boot entries via bcdedit and also went as far to take a Macrium Image that I later on restored.

End result: It was smooth sailing from start to finish!

The only note I would add at this stage is that I was under the impression that when applying the image via dism you would end up directly in Windows but I was wrong, you still end up on the setup screen where you can disable certain settings such as location services, activity history, speech recognition, etc. which was nice to see.

Other than that and a small hiccup with the bcdedit /timeout command that didn't work immediately, it was a great experience :)

@NavyLCDR, apologies for bringing an old thread up but finally the laptop has arrived and I was checking the factory settings.

The partitions are:

EFI: 260MB
Recovery: 1.07GB
Recovery: 200MB
Restore: 22GB
OS: 930.33GB

We agreed to set the EFI partition to 100MB (size=100), shall I change to 260MB?

For the record, the 1TB the machine came with is the Intel SSD 670p, it's not the one I will install Windows on to, I will replace it with the 500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 PCIe3.0 NVMe Solid State Drive.

I read that the EFI partition size depends on the Advanced Format type, whether it's 4K or 512e but unfortunately this is uncharted territory to me.

EFI 100 MB or 260 MB should not matter.