Since SSD prices are dropping, I decided to upgrade my 32GB mSata in HP Envy 4-1117nr to MyDigitalSSD MDMS-BP4e-512 480GB mSata for my El Capitan 10.11.5 partition. It’s quite fast, but due to the EFI folder was in the original 32GB mSata, I needed to create a new EFI folder and boot to the original 1TB hard drive. The process is not very hard, just need some know how. If we don’t move the EFI folder to the hard drive, we won’t be able to boot from the new SSD since the old SSD was replaced.
1. Need to create recovery boot USB for Windows 10.
a. Boot from USB Windows 10 recovery. Select Advanced and Terminal.
- diskpart
- list disk - select disk 1 (hard drive)
- shrink desired=460
- create partition efi size=280
- format quick fs=fat32 label="EFI"
- create partition msr size=128
- list vol
- select vol 3 (if 3 is 280MB EFI we just created)
- assign letter=b:
- exit (exit diskpart)
- cd /d b:\efi\Microsoft\Boot\ (d is the USB recovery partition - b is the new EFI folder)
- boot rec /fixboot
- bcdboot c:\Windows /s b: /f ALL
*If any of the commands failed do to can’t find files – reboot with the USB recovery disk and restart the commands that failed.
b. When everything is done, copy all EFI data from the original 32GB mSata OVER the new EFI folder including all HP folders. We can do this by boot into the old hard drive El Capitan, mount the EFI folder and drag files over to the new one.