I have 2 EFI partitions on 2 separate drives. How do I combine them?

Question

I have a Dell 7567 laptop with 1 SSD and 1 HDD. SSD had windows installed in it.

I'll explain step by step the sequence of events

• I tried installing Ubuntu but installation kept freezing at preparing to install which is the step before partitions

• I decided to remove my ssd and then try to install

• It worked and the install went ahead. I installed Ubuntu on the HDD. Also created a new EFI partition on HDD for Ubuntu.

• after that I put in my ssd again and now I am getting an error message upon selecting to boot to windows.

• I am getting Process1 Intialization failed stopcode

• I think my partitions are messed up due to two efi which is the cause of this error (if you think it's something else please tell me)

  Please tell me how I can fix this. Ubuntu is running fine. But I need windows too. Is there any way to combine my two EFI partitions. I am open to loss of data. Please help.

Answer 1

Short answer:

Overall, this is a Windows problem, so I recommend asking about it on a Windows forum. A quick Google of your error message produced several hits, like this one. I recommend against trying to combine your ESPs, since that's almost certainly not the cause of the problem, and doing so may create new problems. A Boot Info listing (see below) may help in case the problem is Ubuntu-related, but it's most likely a Windows-specific problem without an Ubuntu solution.

Long answer:

Having two ESPs is perfectly legal, although there are some caveats. Most importantly, the Windows 7 installer will choke if there are two ESPs on the same disk. I don't know if it would become confused with two disks, each with its own ESP; and I don't know if this is a problem with more recent versions of Windows. I've never before heard of an already-installed Windows choking because a second disk has a new ESP. (I've installed Windows this way myself without problems.) All of this is to say that an attempt to combine your two ESPs is likely to be a wild goose chase, and may cause new problems itself....

In particular, if you decide to combine the two ESPs, then copying files from one to another is not sufficient; you'd need to create a new NVRAM entry for the copied boot loader with efibootmgr (in Ubuntu), bcdedit or EasyUEFI in Windows, or a similar tool in another OS.

I do have some other thoughts on your problem:

• How are you selecting to boot Windows? -- You say you can opt to boot Windows, but it's unclear how you're doing this. It's likely to be either the EFI's built-in boot manager (the same tool you probably used to boot the Ubuntu installer) or GRUB. If you're using the EFI boot manager, then the system is likely booting the same way it did before (but see the next point); but if you're using GRUB, it may be trying to boot Windows in a very different way. This might be the source of the problem. If so, a BootInfo output from Boot Repair might be helpful in diagnosing the issue. You can run the Boot Repair utility and select the "Create BootInfo Summary" option. (DO NOT click "Recommended Repair," at least not yet!) When asked whether to upload the report, click "Yes," and then post the URL provided here.
• Possible loss of the EFI boot entry for Windows -- EFIs rely on entries in NVRAM to launch boot loaders. Some (but not all) EFIs automatically remove invalid entries, so when you unplugged the Windows disk and booted the computer to install Ubuntu, the original Windows entry may have been deleted. Some EFIs will also automatically add an entry for Windows when it's present, so when you plugged the disk back in, a new entry may have been created -- but this new entry may not be an exact match to the original one. Likewise, Windows usually creates an entry using the fallback filename (EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi), which EFIs launch if nothing else is available, so you might be booting via this entry. This could be a contributing factor to your problem. Unfortunately, if I'm right about this, the original entry is lost, and it might not be clear what it should be, even with Boot Info output; but there might be clues in that output in any event. Windows tools should be able to create a working entry in this case, but this is a subject for discussion on a Windows forum.
• Possible filesystem damage -- Windows 8 and later use features known as Fast Startup and Hibernate, which can cause filesystem damage in a dual-boot setup. Thus, it's imperative that these features both be disabled, as described here and here. If you didn't do this before installing Ubuntu, it's possible that your Windows ESP was damaged somewhere along the line, which could be causing your problem. If so, a filesystem repair (with dosfsck in Ubuntu or CHKDSK in Windows) might fix the problem. In a worst-case scenario, you might need to re-install the Windows boot loader using Windows tools. (Restoring them from a backup would also work, if you've got a backup.)

Note that all of these issues are basically explanations for how the Windows boot failure was triggered. With the possible exception of booting via GRUB, the solution will likely come from running Windows repair tools. If the problem is caused by an attempt to boot Windows via a malformed GRUB boot entry, then fixing that in Ubuntu should fix the problem; but the other causes will require Windows repairs. Thus, posting the Boot Info output may be helpful before you try anything else; but you should be prepared to seek a solution within Windows.

Answer 2

There cannot be mess up with several ESP. Having 2 ESP (1 on each disk) is not a problem. I have W10 on my SSD and Linux Mint on my HDD. My UEFI is configured to boot on the ESP of the HDD with Grub, and when in Grub menu, I have a menu item "Windows Boot Manager" which is a chainload to the ESP of the SSD. It works perfectly (My only concerne is that I would like to put Linux on the SSD and put W10 on HDD - It is a nightmare)

I'm pretty sure, your probleme comes from the fact you removed the SSD. It probably changed the Disks indices somewhere.

First of all, when you installed Ubuntu, the system was as a fresh one. No other OS. So, the Ubuntu Grub was obviously not able to provide you a menu entry for your Windows. So the question (and the clue) is, how were you able to select Windows at boot, after having put back your SSD ????? F12 may be ?

As Rod said, (and you may be confident on what he wrote. Rod is an expert in UEFI. I spent a few days reading his website to find my answer - I should provide him a CSS for his website in compensation ;-) I think you have to run the recovery tool of windows in order to recreate te boot process. What may happen next is that the UEFI will booot on the SSD's ESP. But it's not a problem. You may change it easily.

Answer 3

it can be your firmware's problem. Some firmwares do not support more than one ESP per machine 1,2. Other firmwares even support more than one ESP per disk. The SPEC does not require to support multiple ESP anyway. So you cannot really blame the firmware like this. You have to carefully pick your machine, though I am pretty sure the modern systems after 2020 support almost all required and optional features. Still, I recently got my hands on some old laptops and weird newly built super cheap products only support 1 ESP per machine.

If you figured out you cannot have more than 1 ESP across different disks. Then you still have some options:

• Try to upgrade the BIOS. One of the laptop actually can then accept multiple ESPs after that.

• Check if your BIOS provides option to create boot entry by select specify file in EFI partition. If you can do this, you can then install both windows and grub bootloaders on the same EFI partition. Both of them will compete in the EFI/BOOT/. The EFI/BOOT contain one default bootloader: if you install windows at last, it will be the windows bootloader for example. But as long as they have different bootloader ids, both still have there own separated subdir in EFI/<id>/. Thus you can create boot entries directly pointed to those efi files. Then in the boot menu you can select which one you want to boot. Unlike the legacy mode, you do not need special tool to write info into special range of the partition. The most entries in bcd database or grub.cfg depend on the uuid/label of your root partition. So, in most case, you can simply copy the files in the ESP to combine the 2 ESPs.

  • after copying the file, you need to go into the bios interface to delete the old entries in NVRAM and create new ones.
  • Some machine's boot entry even contains special bcdobject uuid. But you do not need to duplicate that info. once you boot into windows it will probably update it by itself.

• Unfortunately some machines do not provide option to create boot entries by selecting file. You can only select disk. Some of them you can still use efibootmgr to push entries that point to a specific file. However, the dell and lenovo laptops cannot even allow this to happen (The firmware does not allow /File specification in the boot entry, surprisingly). They really only boot from EFI/BOOT/BOOT<arch>.efi Then you have to modify the bcd menu to allow running ubuntu efi application via bcd manager. However, this kind of setup is very unstable. Because any grub update from ubuntu or bcd update from windows can mess up this setting. For those who only have single ESP this is really bad news.

• So at last, I decided to install bootloaders on different USB flash drives. There is no ESP on internal hard drive at all. Then I just plug the corresponding USB drive when I decide to switch system (you do not really need more than 2 per machine, simply one for all windows installations, one for grub managed OSs.). This is a bit annoying but works very stably. You can even have several backups by simply copy the content of EFI partition. This is really the ultimate solution I found, I never had single boot issue at all after this. I start to use this methods on all my machines not just as workaround for those unfortunate firmwares.