
As a technician myself, I can say that in less that 25% of the cases where I encountered this issue was it a case of failing hardware. Know of another method of fixing broken EFI partitions? Have any related tips or thoughts that are helpful? Let us know in the comments!īoth TechTool Pro & DiskWarrior can deal with this without the need to blow away the partition. If the drive is failing, you will need to replace it, and you’d want to do that sooner than later to avoid data loss. If you suspect that may be the case, you may want to attempt to repair the drive through Disk Utility and run Apple Hardware Test on the Mac to see if any hardware related disk errors appear.
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If you go a route aside from simply reinstalling Mac OS X, you may lose data.įinally, something else to keep in mind is that sometimes damaged or broken EFI partitions can be an indicator of an impending disk failure, or some other problem with the hard drive. In other words, no personal data, files, or apps should be lost in the process if all you are choosing to do is reinstall Mac OS X.
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If the Mac Recovery partition works to boot, but not the primary OS – reinstall Mac OS X with regular Recovery modeĪssuming you choose to simply reinstall Mac OS X and you don’t attempt to format the drive or do anything else, then only the Mac OS system software will be replaced and the EFI partition will be recreated in the process.If the Mac won’t boot at all – reinstall Mac OS X with Internet Recovery, this requires a stable and reasonably fast high speed internet connection, or you can use a USB boot disk if you have one available.If that’s the case, all you need to do to fix a broken EFI partition is reinstall Mac OS (or MacOS) as usual and it should be fixed in the process: When booted from a recovery volume, you should run Disk Utility beforehand to verify and attempt to repair the drive in question – though there is a good chance you have already tried that and that is when you discovered the EFI problem to begin with.
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How to Fix Broken EFI Partitions with a System Software Reinstall Hopefully you have made a full backup of the Mac before the EFI partition failed to begin with, otherwise you should complete a backup before attempting to reinstall MacOS system software. You can reinstall Mac OS X using any of three methods: using a bootable disk, using Internet Recovery, or using normal Recover mode, which approach you will probably depend on It is not the most elegant solution, but reinstalling Mac OS system software should repair a broken or damaged EFI partition, or if one is missing somehow it will recreate one in the OS install process.

I fiddled with the other options, but ultimately just reinstalling Mac OS system software did the job for the situation I encountered.

After wrangling with a broken EFI partition on a Mac recently, I personally found the fastest and most foolproof method of fixing the EFI partition and to get the Mac to boot again was simply reinstalling Mac OS X onto the computer. There are options to attempt to manually rebuild, create, or repair the EFI partition, typically with fsck, diskutil, and third party tools like got frisk. Since a broken EFI partition may prevent a Mac from starting up properly it can be a challenge to repair.
