Duplicate Windows 10

[DaveG]

Ok, I'm probably missing something obvious here! I have successfully installed Win 10 on the M2 drive of my PC and it works fine. I want to create a copy onto a second drive (SSD) so that I always have one good bootable copy if I mess things up. I have copied the data partition across to the second drive but I can't see how to make a working entry into the Boot Menu. I have pointed the new entry to the EFI partition but how do I create an entry into the EFI that points to the new drive? The initial Boot Menu entry points to EFI\Microsoft.001\BOOT\bootmgfw.efi but if I just make the new menu entry point to this file as well, then it just boots up on the existing M2 drive. The annoying thing is, that I had this working ok before but now I have changed the hard drive, I can't see how to do it. Any help appreciated.

[Brian K]

Dave,

The easy way to copy a Windows OS is the use "Copy" and "Paste" in Partition Work and put a tick in "Add to Boot Menu". The OS is copied to Free Space and a Boot Item is created. Nothing more to do.

You can either delete your copy and use the above method or let us help you create a Boot Item for your current copied OS.

[DaveG]

Thanks Brian. I thought I remembered that was the way to do it but when I tried, it made the copy but gave an error message at the end saying it couldn't add it to the Boot Menu, therefor I thought I must have remembered wrong and was trying to do it manually.

I have now solved the problem. After reading another post about using TBOSD to edit the EFI partition files to create a second entry, I discovered that the EFI partition was full, preventing the automatic process from writing to it. I freed up space by deleting a number of old entries with TBOSD that were no longer in use and then the automatic 'Add to Boot menu' option worked fine.

Thanks for your help.

[Brian K]

Dave, thanks for the feedback. What is the size of your ESP? The default size of the ESP after a BIU install to a blank disk is 400 MiB. This size allows lots of multi-booting.

[DaveG]

Mmmm, mine is only 99 MB.

The M2 drive is 250 GB; 233 GB formatted and partitioned. There is a Recovery partition of 499 MB, EFI partition of 99 MB, an OEM partition of 827 MB (not sure what this one is?) and the main Boot/Primary partition of 231 GB

[Brian K]

I'd resize it to 400 MiB. Easy to do with BIU.

[DaveG]

Thanks Brian. Yes I'll do that