Is damaged ESP important?

Tombar · Jan 8, 2024

Ran Diskgenius (why? I forget) and noticed a message saying damaged ESP on the SSD boot drive. Is this important and what should I do about it?

hsehestedt · Jan 8, 2024

The ESP partition (also known as an EFI partition) is a very small partition that is used to store UEFI boot loader information and other info related to the UEFI firmware. It is necessary for UEFI boot. Is there any way to get more detail in your program on why it deems that partition to be damaged? I'm not familiar with DiskGenius, so apologies for not being able to give you more feedback.

Ghot · Jan 8, 2024

Disk Genius said mine was damaged too. Two years ago.
I don't know what was damaged, but it's worked fine since then.

Ed Tittel · Jan 8, 2024

@Ghot: If it can go 2 years without repair, that's pretty strong evidence that no repair is needed. Looking at the map I wonder if the AOMEI insertions might be getting flagged. Looking to Google for insight, I checked on EFI partition diagnostics. Looks like there are two paths you can go down to confirm or contradict this finding:
1. Visit your PC (or motherboard) maker's website and look for a focused EFI partition diagnostic tool
2. Try a different general purpose tool, such as (for example) MiniTool Partition Wizard [it's free and reasonably competent]
Based on what the previous poster reported, I wouldn't worry about this unless another tool confirms a problem and/or you're having boot problems of some kind or another.
Remember: if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
HTH,
--Ed--

Winuser · Jan 8, 2024

Unless you're experiencing any problems, I would leave it alone. I do recommended that you make backup images to a external drive with a program such as Macrium Reflect or one of the other imaging programs. I really hate it when someone post about losing important files and we can't help because they don't have a backup to restore their lost files from. I have used many file recovery programs in the past and can truthfully say that as good as some of them were, I never had a 100% succesful file recovery.

Ghot · Jan 8, 2024

@Ed Tittel

But since it seems to work fine... I'm gonna leave it alone.

I don't have a Recovery partition. I wonder if the "damage" is something like a pointer in the EFI partition, that should point to the Recovery partition, but can't because there isn't one?

Ed Tittel · Jan 8, 2024

That makes sense to me @Ghot, but if it's working no need to mess with it. Fascinating to see a 100MB EFI partition. It's up to 260 MB on Windows 11 on my latest loaner PC (Panasonic Toughbook FZ-55 ruggedized laptop).
Thanks,
--Ed--

Ghot · Jan 8, 2024

Ed Tittel said:
That makes sense to me @Ghot, but if it's working no need to mess with it. Fascinating to see a 100MB EFI partition. It's up to 260 MB on Windows 11 on my latest loaner PC (Panasonic Toughbook FZ-55 ruggedized laptop).
Thanks,
--Ed--

Originally, my 500GB Win 10 SSD showed this same issue and still does.
I had a fresh backup of my Win 10 install so I bought another 500GB SSD and "restored" the Win 10 image to it.
Then I did an In-Place Upgrade from Win 10 to Win 11 on the new SSD.

So... both my Win 10 install and my Win 11 install show the same "damaged" EFI partition.
Haven't had a single problem on either drive.

Maybe the "damage" is because I moved the EFI partition to a spot "after" the C:\ drive.

Almost forgot... the original Win 10 install was on an MBR disk.
Sometime in late 2020 or early 2021, I converted the Win 10 install to GPT.

I'm just breaking all the rules.

Disk info from Win 11 SSD...

By the way... Macrium's "Fix Windows Boot problems", doesn't fix this "damaged EFI partition" thingy.

hsehestedt · Jan 8, 2024

Ed Tittel said:
It's up to 260 MB on Windows 11 on my latest loaner PC

260 MB is a magic number

. On the advanced format 4k native drives the minimum sized FAT32 partition that can be created is 260 MB. As a result, I know that some people just set their scripts to always create an EFI partition of 260 MB, that way the script will work on all drives. In fact, that is what I do.

See the note under the "System partition" section of this article:

UEFI/GPT-based hard drive partitions

learn.microsoft.com

hsehestedt · Jan 8, 2024

Follow-up to my last response: Here is another partitioning oddity...

In the very article that I referenced above, it states that an MSR partition should be 16 MB. However, here is another Microsoft article that says 128 MB but that is a very old article:

Understanding Disk Partitions

learn.microsoft.com

I have also seen other suggest the use of 128 MB.

So, to be on the safe side, here is how I always partition my drives:

EFI - 260 MB
MSR - 128 MB
Windows - All remaining space minus 2 GB
Recovery Tools Environment - 2 GB

I know that the 2 GB for the recovery partition is larger than suggested, but the size seems to keep increasing in the last few years, so I give it extra space just to on the safe side. Besides, storage is cheap these days

.

Tombar · Jan 9, 2024

Wow! So many replies! Seems the consensus is ignore it, right? The reason I was asking is that occasionally I get a Green SOD from an Insider programme I'm not enrolled in saying something about unexpected kernel mode trap and I wondered if this might be related.
It also gives an Acronis entry, which is a bit naughty, as I uninstalled Acronis a long time ago - any idea how to get rid of this?

Tombar · Jan 9, 2024

Tombar said:
Wow! So many replies! Seems the consensus is ignore it, right? The reason I was asking is that occasionally I get a Green SOD from an Insider programme I'm not enrolled in saying something about unexpected kernel mode trap and I wondered if this might be related.
It also gives an Acronis entry, which is a bit naughty, as I uninstalled Acronis a long time ago - any idea how to get rid of this?

Wrong screenshot to show Acronis entry - sorry (couldn't find an option to edit the wrong screenshot)

SIW2 · Jan 9, 2024

I think that is probably connected to acronis recovery manager. You could check if there is an entry in bcd. If you unistalled acronis it might have removed the bcd entry and left the efi files on your esp. They could be just sitting there doing nothing.

TechnoMage2021 · Jan 9, 2024

Since each drive manufacturer may have differences in the way that they build and program their SSD's, I will only trust the diagnostic software from the maker of my SSD to tell me how it's doing.
I'm currently running a 500GB Crucial SSD, and I use the diag program put out by Crucial. So far, no errors.

As far as partitioning, the Windows Installer partitions the SSD when I install Windows, and I only split the C: partition to provide a storage partition where I keep all my data. Otherwise, I never mess with the partitions created by the Windows Installer.

But then, that's just me...."If it works, don't mess with it!"

TM

Winuser · Jan 9, 2024

TechnoMage2021 said:
I never mess with the partitions created by the Windows Installer.

Whenever I do a clean Windows install I always delete all partitions and allow the installer to create what Windows needs.

hsehestedt · Jan 9, 2024

Winuser said:
Whenever I do a clean Windows install I always delete all partitions and allow the installer to create what Windows needs.

I like to create may partitions a little bit larger than defaults. For example, it seems like Recovery Environment partitions have been getting larger the last few years. I also make my EFI partition larger than the minimum 100 MB. This is because HDDs that use 4k Advanced Format require that the EFI partition be a minimum of 260 MB since that is the minimum size for a FAT32 partition on that type of disk. This way, if I ever duplicate my drive to an Advanced 4k Format drive, I'm covered. Is that likely? No, but as cheap as storage is these days, using an extra 2 GB space or so is nothing.

Here is my specific partitioning scheme (for a drive with a single installation of Windows and no additional partitions).

EFI Partition: 260 MB
MSR: 128 MB
Windows: All remaining space minus 2 GB
Recovery Environment: 2 GB

SIW2 · Jan 9, 2024

I usually do 300mb and 128mb. I dont bother with recovery part, but if I was to do that probably 1.5gb would be fine. The recov media from dell hp etc can have big bootable wims

Winuser · Jan 9, 2024

hsehestedt said:
I like to create may partitions a little bit larger than defaults. For example, it seems like Recovery Environment partitions have been getting larger the last few years. I also make my EFI partition larger than the minimum 100 MB. This is because HDDs that use 4k Advanced Format require that the EFI partition be a minimum of 260 MB since that is the minimum size for a FAT32 partition on that type of disk. This way, if I ever duplicate my drive to an Advanced 4k Format drive, I'm covered. Is that likely? No, but as cheap as storage is these days, using an extra 2 GB space or so is nothing.

Here is my specific partitioning scheme (for a drive with a single installation of Windows and no additional partitions).

EFI Partition: 260 MB
MSR: 128 MB
Windows: All remaining space minus 2 GB
Recovery Environment: 2 GB

I checked my two desktops to see what the EFI partitions sizes are. On my new desktop the EFI partition is 256 MB and on my old desktop The EFI partition is 100 MB. I was getting ready to say that this is the way there were set up when I bought them. Then I remembered that I had to do a clean install of Windows 11 Canary on the old desktop. They both have a NVMe drive for the system drive so I don't know why the EFI partition sizes are different.

hsehestedt · Jan 9, 2024

Interesting. I think that Windows typically uses 100 MB unless it is on an Advanced Format 4k Native HDD. On the system where it is 256 MB, is that a factory installation? If so, maybe that's just how the manufacturer created it.

In the end, it really doesn't matter.

hsehestedt · Jan 9, 2024

I should just add that the only reason I ever worry about all these details is because I do a lot of unattended installation testing. One oddity of unattended installations is that these DO NOT create the Recovery Environment partition last as recommended by Microsoft. As a result, I script the partitioning so that it puts that partition last as it should be.