Windows Boot Manager Problem

One of my Seagate 500 GB drives has gone haywire and I decided I better replace it before it crashes all together. So I got a WD 1T and used Minitool Partition Magic to transfer the WIN 7 OS to the new drive. I can see both drives in BIOS and Explorer but I cannot get the system to boot on the new drive by itself. So somehow Window Boot Manager is defaulting to the old drive. So my question is how do I get Boot Manager to boot off the new drive?

The FAT32 partition on the old drive says that it's active and boot and on the new drive it only says Active. The main partitions are NTFS.

I also made the new drive MBR instead of GPT.

Any input appreciated.

andyb9 said:

One of my Seagate 500 GB drives has gone haywire and I decided I better replace it before it crashes all together. So I got a WD 1T and used Minitool Partition Magic to transfer the WIN 7 OS to the new drive. I can see both drives in BIOS and Explorer but I cannot get the system to boot on the new drive by itself. So somehow Window Boot Manager is defaulting to the old drive. So my question is how do I get Boot Manager to boot off the new drive?

The FAT32 partition on the old drive says that it's active and boot and on the new drive it only says Active. The main partitions are NTFS.

I also made the new drive MBR instead of GPT.

Any input appreciated.

Did you copy everything to the new drive, including the "system reserved" partition from the old drive? The "system reserved" partition is marked "active" and is where Boot Manager lives. If you're planning on replacing the old drive then you must be sure you've copied everything you need to from the old drive to the new, and not just the Windows C-partition.

So, do you have a "system reserved" partition on the old drive? Or did you never have it because of your OS upgrade path over the years, and your Win7 C-partition on that drive truly was marked as "active" (indicating Boot Manager lived in the same partition as Windows itself)?

Please post a screenshot from DISKMGMT.MSC so that we can see exactly what your two-drive setup currently looks like. Can't really provide reliable advice unless we know what your two drives currently look like. Please full-screen the presentation and spread the columns so we can see the text in each cell, and then take the screenshot.


But for sure...

Go into the BIOS of your machine, and move the new drive up to the #1 position in the hard drive list.

Also, go into the "boot device sequence" and place the new drive as the first hard drive (probably should after USB key, CD/DVD, etc., so that you can boot from those other removable devices if you have to else it will go to your new hard drive).

And finally, if you used MiniTool's Partition Wizard (it's not named "Partition Magic", which is a similarly named but completely different old product that worked under WinXP but does not work any longer on Win7) to copy the Win7 OS partition to the new drive, be sure it is marked as "active" if this partition was marked "active" on the old drive. The BIOS looks for the "active" partition on the first hard drive listed in the boot sequence.

But if you had a "system reserved" partition on the old drive it would be the "active" partition. Again, if you're planning on removing the failing drive you want all of the old partitions copied over to the new drive, including this "system reserved" partition as well (and it then needs to be marked "active", not the Windows OS partition).

However I still question the status of "system reserved" partition on the old drive, as to whether or not you had one and whether or not you've copied it over to the new drive. Awaiting your screenshot.

It's not letting me post an image so here's a link where I put it.

Phoenix West Valley

Also, it is Partition Wizard and whatever it copies when you run the Migrate OS wizard is what copied.

Hi Andyb9 Boot to BIOS and change the boot order to Windows installation CD (optical drive). Shutdown. Disconnect all drives but the new drive. Put your new Seagate drive in SATA port 0.Turn on computer and it should boot to the CD. Boot with the same windows installation disk you used with the previous drive. Select the bootable seagate and install windows. You may have to wipe the old drive to use it as a slave drive. GPT is only used for 2 terabyte drives or more and can only be used with UEFI BIOS with windows 8 64bit. I recommend NTFS for your old drive and new. Hope this helps.

andyb9 said:

It's not letting me post an image so here's a link where I put it.

Phoenix West Valley

Also, it is Partition Wizard and whatever it copies when you run the Migrate OS wizard is what copied.

Ok. It looks like Partition Wizard did everything it should have when you did the "migrate OS wizard". The "system reserved" partition (active on your 500GB original, and also active on the new 1TB second drive) got copied, as well as the C-partition.

Actually, PW also copied the GPT "placeholder" 128MB partition although it really has no purpose on an MBR drive. So technically that 128MB unallocated space on the new 1TB drive can be deleted (using Partition Wizard), and its space added to the C partition to its right (which currently shows as M, but which is actually the copy of your Windows partition from the original 500GB drive).

The new 1TB drive was formatted as MBR (which is fine), and the original 500GB drive was formatted as GPT (not a problem, but not really necessary for a 500GB drive with only one partition on it). No harm here, and again Partition Wizard did what it needed to.

So, I believe we're back where my original post said we were. You need to get into the BIOS and change the hard drive sequence, to show your new 1TB drive as the first hard drive in the SATA drive list , and also to specify that drive as the first hard drive in the boot sequence list. It's all looking good... and you just need to point the BIOS to it to boot from the "system reserved" (active) partition on the 1TB drive, which will happen if you put the drive as #1 hard drive in the boot sequence list in the BIOS.

NOTE: what currently shows as M will in fact become C when you straighten out the drives in the BIOS and finally boot from the new 1TB drive.