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So this issue goes beyond simply formatting it and I’ve tinkered and made it worse. I’ll try to be somewhat brief. In the end, I’m hoping there is software that can maybe be a one-click solution.

I retired a laptop and that laptop has a way bigger SSD than the one in my new laptop. The old laptop was partitioned in a way to dual boot either windows or Linux Mint. Let’s say the SSD has 1TB of space. I allocated 200GB to Linux and the rest was to windows. Then there’s a factory partition for recovery.

Well, I thought I could just do a quick format on it then begin the process of cloning my smaller SSD currently in the laptop I want to use and all would be good. Wrong.

Now the fucking thing doesn’t let me do anythinge research with it.

I spent time in forums and YouTube researching. I think maybe the Linux partition and the booting options may have been my issue but this was the only computer I’ve ever had set up like that so I was ignorant to the problems I could create.

What kind of solution would just bring this SSD back to being empty and able to accept my clone like the day it was purchased?

So this issue goes beyond simply formatting it and I’ve tinkered and made it worse. I’ll try to be somewhat brief. In the end, I’m hoping there is software that can maybe be a one-click solution. I retired a laptop and that laptop has a way bigger SSD than the one in my new laptop. The old laptop was partitioned in a way to dual boot either windows or Linux Mint. Let’s say the SSD has 1TB of space. I allocated 200GB to Linux and the rest was to windows. Then there’s a factory partition for recovery. Well, I thought I could just do a quick format on it then begin the process of cloning my smaller SSD currently in the laptop I want to use and all would be good. Wrong. Now the fucking thing doesn’t let me do anythinge research with it. I spent time in forums and YouTube researching. I think maybe the Linux partition and the booting options may have been my issue but this was the only computer I’ve ever had set up like that so I was ignorant to the problems I could create. What kind of solution would just bring this SSD back to being empty and able to accept my clone like the day it was purchased?

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It's a little more involved. I put the EFI partition first, either copying the old one or formatting the new. Then you need the Microsoft Reserved partition (some say 16MB, some say 128MB). Then when doing the bcdboot thing, you need to use to be sure you've got a drive letter for the EFI (I usually assign S:), (use list vol to see logical volumes and assigned letters) and Windows partitions (usually D: here). If that's correct, then

bcdboot D:\Windows -s S:

I'm assuming some familiarity with formatting the disk GPT, creating partitions with the correct partition types (GUID). The bcdboot for me is the "magic" step that's needed to make it happy.