Windows 8 System Disk Confusion

David Hyde · Nov 23, 2014

Hi,

My 1Tb non-system disk has been giving trouble recently, so I bought a 2Tb replacement, fitted it, Robocopied the files I wanted over, took the old drive out and rebooted.

What happened was a Windows 7 OS recovery was attempted and failed. I couldn't boot the computer.

I installed Windows 8 over top of Windows 7 when it first came out. To the best of my memory this involved reformatting the Windows 7 system disk so that Windows 8 could be installed. The system disk has the Windows directory, the progam files and the users directory. Until now, I thought that it was my system disk. Putting the 1Tb disk back in and setting this as the boot disk in the BIOS allowed me to boot Windows 8 again.

Now it seems that the boot partition is actually on the 1Tb disk that I'm expecting to fail at any time.

What can I do? Can I make my "system disk" the boot disk without having to reformat and reinstall?

Hope someone can help.

David

Trouble · Nov 23, 2014

Just wanted to say thanks to Wolfgang for the link to his tutorial on using Easy BCD to accomplish this task.
I tested it on my own install and found that it worked without a hitch.
Afterwards I rebooted without issue.
I then deleted the System Volume (350 MB).
Rebooted again without issue.
Used Acronis Disk Directory to add the 350 MB back to my C: drive
Rebooted without issue.
Then uninstalled EasyBCD.
A lot easier than all the other complicated, convoluted explanations I've found elsewhere on the web and as simple as the 1, 2, 3 steps in his tutorial.
Thanks again
Randy.

Trouble · Nov 23, 2014

Hello and welcome to the forum.
What you want and apparently need to do is not supported nor recommended by Microsoft and is no easy walk in the park but I can understand your predicament and certainly understand you wanting to do something about it aside from a complete clean install.
The steps are described it some detail in this article http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409
I hope you find it useful...
AND
As always, backup, backup, backup.

David Hyde · Nov 23, 2014

Bloody hell! Thanks, I'll think about doing it.

whs · Nov 23, 2014

Here is something else you can try: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/209885-bootmgr-move-c-easybcd.html

Trouble · Nov 23, 2014

Just wanted to say thanks to Wolfgang for the link to his tutorial on using Easy BCD to accomplish this task.
I tested it on my own install and found that it worked without a hitch.
Afterwards I rebooted without issue.
I then deleted the System Volume (350 MB).
Rebooted again without issue.
Used Acronis Disk Directory to add the 350 MB back to my C: drive
Rebooted without issue.
Then uninstalled EasyBCD.
A lot easier than all the other complicated, convoluted explanations I've found elsewhere on the web and as simple as the 1, 2, 3 steps in his tutorial.
Thanks again
Randy.

whs · Nov 23, 2014

Thanks Randy for the feedback. I am glad it served you well.

Trouble · Nov 24, 2014

You're welcome. It's not too often I find something as easy to do, as the solution you provided so I just had to try it.
It wasn't something I necessarily even want to do or needed to do and I hadn't played with EasyBCD since back during my brief and early Vista days but I had to try it. And......
son of a gun, if it didn't work, perfectly.
So thanks again for the great tip. Much appreciated and it should serve the OP in this thread just as well.

David Hyde · Nov 24, 2014

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I'm sure that I can sort myself out now.

David Hyde · Dec 13, 2014

Me again! Finally got round to doing this and Easy BCD did the job, nice and quickly, no drama. Thanks for the help.

Windows 8 System Disk Confusion

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