Windows 10: Windows 11 partition cloning & BCD operations on a UEFI PC

I have UEFI PC with two windows on different disks and I am successfully dual booting windows 11 and have been for a good while now.To date I have managed the two systems separately, manually updating System 2 with any updates previously made to System 1. But this is a time consuming process and I would like instead to simply clone my System 1 windows partition to replace the System 2 partition every so often.My question is with the BCD already setup to boot system 2 can I just delete and replace the system 2 windows partition with a cloned version of the system 1 windows partition ?

:)

 

Steps to Rebuild the UEFI Boot Partition and for Rebuild BCD

Can someone please Lay out the Steps (Precisely) to Re-Instate the EFI Boot Partition and the Steps (Commands) to Rebuild the BCD for UEFI

 

Steps to Rebuild the UEFI Boot Partition and for Rebuild BCD

Hello Nasho. I'm Greg, here to help you with this.

Did the EFI System partition get deleted? If so here is how to recreate it from scratch:

http://woshub.com/how-to-repair-deleted-efi-par...

All steps are here to repair or rebuild the BCD:

https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-rebuild-the-bcd...

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/rebuild-bcd-wind...

For the issue of Total Identified Windows Installations: 0 try these steps:



Everything else to get WIndows 10 started is here, including at the end a rescue install where you shrink C or a data partition to install Windows 10 to a Dual Boot, if it starts the old install you can then delete the Rescue install and use the new EFI System partition it creates:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki...

Feel free to ask back any questions. Based on the detailed results you post back, I will have other suggestions if necessary.

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Cloned SSD can't boot - broken BCD

@mark9 To help you best it is paramount to establish a solid basis by knowing existing and pre-existing conditions & configurations. Going through this section I see a garden-variety and chaos. Also, don't be misled by Windows error codes that can be quite deceptive and irrelevant to the issue as I experience myself. Computers require very systematic and procedural/sequential steps! With that we can start a solid foundation what are the next steps and how to proceed, otherwise it's a "Too many cooks spoil the broth" situation and nobody really knows where you stand without having established first clarified and established some essential basics. My first question is: do you know if you are you booting in regular MBR (Master Boot Record)[Legacy BIOS] or GPT (GUID Partition Table) which requires UEFI? (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) It's a difference of a world! For more details what this is you can look it up at i.e. Wikipedia. Have you plugged in your cloned drive in exchange of the old? When you cloned, did you have your cloned drive connected to another port? The holy Grail of windows booting is the BCD. ( Boot Configuration Data) A binary file. However, you need to know and understand a little bit how all works. To boot Windows there are essentially two parts to it, 1) the Windows Boot Manager followed by 2) the Windows Boot Loader. All incorporated in the BCD file, a binary file who's configuration you can see by entering in a CMD window at a driver prompt: "BCDedit". Since you apparently have a FAT32 ~100MB partition (EFI) it seems that you are booting in UEFI mode. This partition has also by default no drive letter and label assigned and is hidden. However, in your disk management screenshot you do not show such roughly 100 MB FAT32 partition. So this leaves me a little confused now as to what your condition really is. With the old drive in place try this first; boot either from a Windows installation disk, USB stick etc. After the language choice menu do not select install (!) but select "repair pc/computer" and then you should see choices such as "open CMD prompt". You might have to click on "advanced options" first to find that. Once you found and opened a CMD window you should end with a CMD window that says something like: this "X:\Windows\system 32>" At the prompt type in: BCDedit and hit enter. Provide us with some sort of "screenshot". (a sharp enough cell phone photo screenshot is fine) Then do the same thing but have at the same port the now cloned drive connected. Later next steps would be then diskpart, list disk, sel disk, list vol and list par and disk par /? But there's more to it, so later. I suspect that when you cloned your drive you most likely used another port. Thus, should you plug in the cloned drive into the port of the original, it is possible in the BCD on the cloned drive the device/path config pointing to the wrong drive, partition and volume. (assuming of course that the original drive has a correct BCD and boots and the cloned life you have plugged in place of the original) This typically creates some totally misleading and truly irrelevant BSoD and other boot error messages. I speak from personal experience and a few late nights!