Hi Brian K. I am using Bootit UEFI in my HP laptop with windows 10. Is there a way to delete the Microsoft.002, Microsoft.003, etc directories created at EFI System Partition? Thanks in advance for your help.
Joel, Those folders contain the booting files for their respective Windows OS. How many Microsoft OS are you multi-booting?
Hello @Brian K , I have a question for you... I thought I had read in one of your posts (I can not find it at present though) that you now install BIU first on a drive before anything else. I have always installed it after I have installed Windows. Is there any advantage to installing BIU first? If I do this, is there anything that I may need to be aware of as I proceed? I ask as when the next Windows version comes out this (version 2004 I believe it is) I may just wipe my disk and start fresh.
Kent, There is an advantage to installing BIU to a blank drive. The installation creates a 16 MiB MSR and a 400 MiB EFI System partition. When you install Win10 to a blank drive you get a 100 MiB EFI System partition. If you then install BIU (the files go into the EFI System partition) there is only space remaining for the booting files of two Microsoft OS. If you want to multi-boot more than two Microsoft OS you will have to make the EFI System partition larger. This usually means the Windows partition has to be resized a few hundred MiB smaller and you will have to slide the Windows partition to create Free Space after the EFI System partition. The EFI System partition can then be resized larger. This procedure can be time consuming if you have a lot of data in the Win10 partition. Easily done but time consuming. The booting files for each Microsoft OS consume about 26 MiB of space in the EFI System partition. The booting files for each Linux OS consume about 4 MiB of space in the EFI System partition.
After you install BIU to a blank drive, create a NTFS partition and install Win10 into this partition. The Windows installer will probably say the partitions aren't in the correct order but ignore this and continue. BIU will create a Boot item for Win10. It is easy. Regarding partition order. You can have the MSR, ESP, Win10 and RE in any order you like and Win10 will still work.
Hello Brian, Thanks a lot ... That is pretty much what I thought you had said in another post somewhere. I thought I had remembered you saying something about a warning and that was my main concern that I wanted to clarify. You have answered all of my questions and I do appreciate it !
Hello Brian, Yes it is... The only thing that I had not done in the past was installing BIU first to a blank disk. My main concern was to be sure that there was no "warning" to worry about as I thought you had mentioned that elsewhere previously. Now I now what the "warning" is and that I can ignore it.
In my test computer I made the EFI System partition 600 MiB as I intended to install lots of OS and didn't know how much space would be needed. I have over 25 OS, most are Linux. The ESP has about 300 MiB of Free Space so 600 MiB was excessive for my ESP.
Hello Brian, Thanks for that extra bit of info... That is good to know. The 100 MB is on the low side and definitely could cause some extra time consuming work in the future. 400 MB would give me plenty of growing room if it were ever needed. Also, I had thought about moving the recovery partition to the end of the disk and place the Windows partition immediately before it.. Most of my extra free space is in the Windows partition. If a Windows upgrade ever had to increase the size of the recovery partition, I would hopefully not end up with an extra partition.
I built a new computer in February and installed Win10. I was surprised that a RE partition wasn't created. The RE files are in the Win10 partition. Unfortunately, Microsoft can resize your Win10 partition smaller and create a new RE partition in the Free Space just created. If desired you can move the RE files into the Win10 partition and delete the RE partition. From MudCrab...
Hello Brian, I assume that if the recovery partition is moved to the Windows partition then Windows will stop creating new recovery partitions with future upgrades and just upgrade the Windows partition as necessary? Edited to add: I assume that there in no disadvantage or negative effect in doing this?
Not necessarily. I've had the RE files in Win10 and the next Win10 upgrade created a RE partition. Not that I've seen or read about. As I mentioned above, my recent Win10 install didn't create a RE partition. Maybe this is the new default.
Hello Brian, If that is the case, for me at least, there seems not much reason to go through the trouble of doing the moving. I think I will just do my install the normal way and see what happens. As to where the recovery files end up, either place will be fine with me and I will not worry about moving them...
I've stopped moving the RE files. It makes no difference to me if there is a RE partition or not. With UEFI systems you have to do multi partition backups. Backup images of ESP, MSR, Win10 and RE if it is present.
Hello Brian, I totally agree with you. I am going to leave well enough alone as there seems to be no real advantages in going through any of the extra work that it would take...
An interesting observation. The MSR in my computer starts in LBA 34. That's the sector immediately after the Primary GUID partition table. It's the only partition that doesn't start on a 1 MiB boundary. But that's OK as it doesn't contain meaningful information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table In my test computer, the ESP is the first partition and it start in LBA 2048. A 1 MiB boundary.
If a Win10 upgrade creates an extra RE partition (ie there are now 2 RE) you can confirm the new RE is the one in use and delete the old one... From the PowerShell or Admin Command Prompt, you can use the command reagentc /info to check which is the "valid" recovery partition (the one that contains the WinRE). diskpart select disk 0 list par (now you know the partition numbers) C:\WINDOWS\system32>reagentc /info Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration Information: Windows RE status: Enabled Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition2\Recovery\WindowsRE Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: b45c4e16-1b1a-11e7-9cda-8429983162c5 Recovery image location: Recovery image index: 0 Custom image location: Custom image index: 0 REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.
Just when we thought the RE would be easy. I have a 50000 MiB test Win10 partition. It was upgraded to Win 10 ver 2004 Preview last night. The Win10 partition was resized (by the upgrade) smaller and a 481 MiB RE partition was created. As this was a test system I moved the RE files into the Win10 partition and the partition was resized to 50000 MiB in BIU.
Hello Brian, Yeah. it definitely looks like there is no solution to stop the movement or the resizing of the RE files no matter what is tried. I think Windows has a mind of its own when it comes to this but as far as I am concerned, I see no rhyme or reason to any of it...
Hello @Brian K , I am trying to get BootNow on a BIU system working with a fresh install of Linux Mint Cinnamon 20 but I am having issues. I have always used your instructions here: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/bootit-uefi.405427/page-5#post-2770309 in previous versions of Mint and it has always worked. When trying to do the above, I get the following error: and I have a feeling that since Mint is now 64-bit only that it does not support 32-bit libraries anymore or maybe Mint 20 requires doing something different... I was wondering if you had tried BootNow on a fresh install of Mint 20 and if so, did you have any issues... Any advice would be appreciated...
Kent, This is what I did in Mint 20... (slightly different from before) Extracted the ifl zip in bjk folder. Renamed the ifl folder to 340 Copied bootnowu into bjk/bn make sure bootnowu is executable (right click, Properties. Permissions, tick in Executable) Open a Terminal and cd /bjk sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install lib32z1 libncurses5:i386 libjpeg62:i386 libxext6:i386 libxft2:i386 libxinerama1:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libncursesw5:i386 libxcursor1:i386 sudo wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/libp/libpng/libpng12-0_1.2.54-1ubuntu1_i386.deb sudo dpkg -i libpng12-0_1.2.54-1ubuntu1_i386.deb sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g sudo adduser brian disk restart computer install ifl from Terminal by cd /bjk/340 sudo ./setup It worked fine.
Hello @Brian K , This confuses me a bit as I do not use or install IFL in Mint. I only use BootNow. Would I still need to do all of the above if all I want or need is the BootNow components?
Kent, do all of the above except sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g and installing IFL Does it work?
