Thursday, 27 December 2012

HOW TO CHANGE BOOT DRIVE IN WINDOWS


I have two Solid State Drives and one platter-
based drive connected to my PC. One of the 
SSDs contains the Windows 7 operating system, 
the other nothing of importance anymore but 
the System Reserved partition. Any attempt to 
disconnect the drive from the system resulted 
in boot errors due to missing boot 
information. Since I do not really need that 
second SSD anymore I decided to find a way to 
move the System Reserved partition from that 
drive to my new SSD instead so that it would 
boot just fine without the second drive.

After fiddling around with it for a while I 
stumbled upon a solution that it probably the 
easiest option to move the boot information of 
the system to the hard drive the system is 
installed on. Instead of creating a system 
reserved partition on the main hard drive and 
moving the data of the original system 
reserved partition to it, it is possible to 
simply move the boot loader from the system 
reserved partition to the drive the operating 
system is installed on.

Note that you should not do that if you are 
using Bitlocker encryption or any other 
software that is using the system reserved 
partition. As always, it is suggested to 
create a backup of your drive before you 
start. A program you can use for that purpose 
is DriveImage XML. It is free for personal use 
and can backup the full partitions. If you 
prefer to use a different program, check out 

The one program you need to move boot 
information to your primary drive is EasyBCD 
which is available free for personal use from 
the developer website. Scroll down until you 
see the solutions, and click on Register there 
underneath non-commercial. You are taken to a 
page where a click on download downloads the 
file to your system. You do not need to enter 
your email address here prior to downloading.

Start EasyBCD after installation and perform 
the following operations:
  • Click on BCD Backup/Repair
  • Select Change boot drive under BCD Management Options
  • Click on Perform Action
easy bcd change boot drive
A popup window is displayed then asking you to 
pick the new drive letter for your system. It 
is usually drive c that you should pick here. 
You will get a success message in the end that 
informs you about the change.

boot partition changed

If the drive the operating system is on is the 
first boot disk, you do not need to change 
anything. If it is not the first disk, you 
need to change the boot order in the BIOS / 
UEFI.

In my case, I simply removed the second Solid 
State Drive from the system to use the primary 
one as by new boot drive.

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