Windows 7 How to move Windows 7 boot manager

jpmays

New Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2009
I recently had to do a complete reinstall of Windows 7 Pro 32-bit. I have 5 hard drives, 2 of which are on a RAID1 mirror, which happens to be where the OS is installed.


For some reason, after installing the OS, I noticed that the Windows Boot Manager was placed on a different drive, apart from where the OS is installed. As normal, I've installed the OS on the C: partition/drive, however, the boot manager was placed on my H: drive/partition, which is where I store all my music.


Unfortunately, I need to replace my music drive, and I was wondering if there is a way to relocate the boot manager to the system drive. I've read articles on the net, where this was possible on Windows Vista, but I haven't seen anything with regards to Windows 7 yet.


Is this even possible? If so, I would be much obliged and forever in your debt for some assistance, and/or instructions on how to go about performing this task.


Thanks.


Peace out... on the flip side!
 
Yes, it's easy to do with the proper commands. Please post a screenshot of disk management in Windows 7 and I'll outline the procedure for you.
 
TorrentG is correct, moving or replacing the boot files is fairly easy.

What happened was the Win 7 install looks for or even creates an active partition on the primary system drive. In your case it must have been your music drive. This is determined by the drive order in the bios.

After install, the system will boot to the first active partition it encounters during boot going in drive order, so once again, the order of your drives in the bios is fairly important.

It is, As TorrentG suggests, very helpful to have a picture of your Disk Management window. Using the Snipping tool and attaching using the paper clip is the easiest way to do this. Labeling the partitions, at least the OS ones would help also.

You basically need to do 3 things. First, make the boot partition active. In your case this would be C: or the Win 7 partition. Use Disk Management for this.

Then you need to make that partition the first active partition encountered during the boot. Set that drive as primary or first in the bios order. If you use the bcdboot command shown later, set the order during the reboot after adding the boot files. If you use the Repair Install Method, it must be done prior to that action.

Then you need to add the boot files to the C: partition (in your case). You can do this in one of two ways.

The way I prefer is to open an administrative command prompt. Do this by typing CMD in the Start Menu search box and hit CTRL+Shift Enter Then type the following.

bcdboot C:\Windows /s C:

Hit enter and wait for it to finish, then close the command window.

You can also add the boot files by running a Startup Repair 2 or 3 times to replace the original boot files.

The Disk Management picture will help assure us there is nothing strange about your system that might cause a problem.
 
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I have a similar problem with the boot manager on a D:\ drive (this drive only contains personal files). If I understand this correctly, I would do the following:

In Disk Management, I would right click my C drive (which is my boot drive but not active) and MARK PARTITION AS ACTIVE. It is currently not. Question, will this remove the active status on the D: drive, and is there any problems with 2 ACTIVE drives?

Open a CMD prompt and type
bcdboot C:\Windows /s C:

Reboot computer and enter bios. Make sure C:\ drive is primary boot drive.

Thanks.

(This all started when I installed a new SSD with the D:\ drive still in the computer)
 
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