How To Delete EFI Partition?
Introduction
EFI stands for Extensible Firmware Interface. It is a replacement for BIOS (basic input/output system) firmware interface(s). EFI works with the help of GPT (GUID partition table).
The UEFI (Universal Extensible Firmware Interface) is a specification that defines boot methods for computers. It replaces the BIOS firmware interface originally present in all IBM PC-descended computers.
The EFI system partition (ESP) is a data storage device that contains the minimum files required to boot the operating system, and additional boot-time executables. This partition is usually formatted with FAT32 or FAT16 file systems. It may be stored on your HDD or SSD drive, or even in some cases on removable media like a floppy or compact flash drive.
Why delete the EFI partition?
If you are upgrading your system or re-installing an operating system then, you must be wondering what would happen if your Windows Setup doesn’t find any other existing partitions on your hard disk.
Well, in such cases it will make another partition called EFI which is 100MB size and usually placed before C Drive. This is useful when both MBR & GPT are used together otherwise it’s pretty much useless since only one type of partition table can be used at once unless you have updated your system to Windows 10/8.1 or Server 2012 R2 with its UEFI support.
Although you can delete the EFI partition , it is not recommended since most of the programs installed in PC require this partition to work properly like antivirus, driver installation programs etc.
One solution would be to shrink your Primary partition & create another Primary one for installation but that’s not practical at all because you will lose some disk space in this process especially when you are low on free disk space (because you will need more than 16GB free space if creating only 1 primary drive).
How to delete an EFI partition?
following instructions will help you in deleting and creating EFI partitions.
Please note: The steps below could change depending upon the version of Windows you are using.
1. Right click on This PC or My Computer and select Manage .
2. A new window will appear with a tree structure having four options: System, Storage, Disk Management and Administrative Tools. You need to click on “Disk Management” option displayed in second row as shown below:
3. After clicking on Disk Management option another window appears with all your hard disk is displayed showing its partitions (if any). Here if both MBR & GPT type of partition tables are used then it will be difficult to identify unallocated space available for creating EFI partitions without seeing other hidden partitions also present in your system which have been used by some third party program or OS installed earlier. So make sure that only MBR is in use in your system (Easy Recovery Essentials does not support GPT disk).
4. Now select the volume (disk) on which you want to create a new EFI partition and right click on it. A context menu will appear where you go to New > Primary Partition . Another window will appear showing unallocated space available for creating new partitions but again if both MBR & GPT are used together then this step can be skipped because it would be difficult to identify 100MB unallocated space without seeing all other hidden partitions also present in your system. So make sure that only MBR is used in your computer using Easy Recovery Essentials .
5. Now type “Diskmgmt.msc” in the RUN dialog box and press Enter to open Disk Management utility. Here you will find your C drive is occupying all the space since we deleted the adjacent 100MB partition as well as the EFI system reserved partition earlier. Select the volume using which you wish to install Windows on it and choose Shrink Volume… from its context menu as shown below:
6. Finally, follow the next windows one-by-one & change desired size for your Primary partition and click the Shrink button present at bottom right corner of this window.
That’s all! You have successfully created a new 100MB primary partition & deleted EFI partitions from your system. Now you can proceed with windows installation normally by selecting this drive.
Post Installation Tasks:
Now after installing windows and making all the necessary changes you will need to delete the 100MB System Reserved partition if it was not automatically removed earlier (as we did in Step 2). This is because this 100MB space is reserved for boot manager hence it’s better to keep some margin between those two partitions (C,100MB EFI & D, rest of the free space) as shown below: It will reduce the chances of Windows Setup over writing C drive during next installation or upgrade process.
Conclusion
I hope this article has provided some insight into how to delete EFI system reserved partitions and how it can be useful in many cases for clean Windows installation. Even though it’s not possible to install all of the modern 64-bit (x64) editions of Windows using MBR but you will need to compromise on certain features like BitLocker, Secure Boot etc. if you are looking forward towards clean installation without loosing more disk space by deleting EFI partitions.
