Windows 8 System Disk Confusion

[David Hyde]

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]

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]

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

 

[whs]

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

 

[Trouble]

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]

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

 

[Trouble]

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]

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

 

[David Hyde]

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