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Is an EFI partition needed on a non-boot SSD?

J

JohnReid

Junior Member
I've done my share of searching, but nothing matches my situation...

I just threw in my 80 gig Gen 1 Intel X25 into my Win 7 64 box, to be used as a data drive (it was previously used as a boot drive in my Mac Pro).

After formatting, I noticed that it has an EFI partition of 200 megs. While it's not a lot of space, I was curious as to why it's there (all the info I found on line was in regards to boot disks)... this was further piqued when I used the Intel toolbox and saw that the Toolbox program considered the data SSD as a boot drive, apparently since it had the EFI partition on it.

So, do SSDs just get the partition regardless of what they're used for? Or can I delete it?

Thanks!
 
EFI can only read FAT so a small FAT partition is required for it. If your'e not booting from EFI then you don't need that partition.
 
Cool, thanks.

I guess the best way to get rid of it is to use the command prompt "diskpart"?

as in:

list disk<enter>
select disk ?<enter> ?=disk number the 200mb part is on
clean<enter>

or is there some other way to do it? Disk management won't let me do it.
 
Not at my PC right now, but the disk showed up as 2 partitions in Disk Management after I installed it, and when I reformatted the disk, I still couldn't get rid of the EFI (when I right click on the EFI partition, all the menu is grey out, so I can't delete it).

Could this be due to the fact that the drive used to be used as a boot disk on my intel Mac Pro?
 
I'm not sure, I've never put an EFI boot disk in a Windows machine before. Maybe Windows is trying to protect you from yourself and outsmarting you. If that's the case then yea, diskpart or a gparted live CD would be the best options.
 
So I ended up using Diskpart to get rid of the EFI partition, it worked without issue.

I'm thinking the EFI partition was a remnant of when i was using the SSD as a boot drive on my intel MacPro...:hmm:

Thanks for your help, all.
 
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