System reserved on D-drive, Windows on C-drive booboo...

I know it's a fairly common rookie mistake, but I'm a plumber by trade and I don't get much experience building PCs...so I apologize for my carelessness, but still hope someone is willing to bail me out with this.

I muffed my image restore attempt after a nearly complete hardware upgrade, and decided to go ahead and reinstall windows and restore files to a clean install, but I left both new SSD disks in when I installed Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.

Now I've got my System reserve on one disk, and my Windows C-drive on another....and I spent many, many hours reloading programs and data to complete the restore before I realized what I had done

My desktop boots fine after stopping and forcing me to choose which "Windows 7" install I want to use during boot up , but I'm hoping one of you all can tell me how to recombine windows on C-drive so it will boot without stalling on "two" Windows installs and make backing up understandable for a simple man like me.

This is a screen shot of what I've got now:

You don't need system reserved per se, but you do need the files within it.

Notice that system reserved in your pic is marked "system". That indicates that your boot files are in that partition.

You can copy those files to C using this tutorial and application:

Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD

After you do that, system reserved would be unneeded (unless you use "BitLocker", unlikely). So you could delete it.

You would need to mark the C partition as "active" after you move the files.

Here's a pic of my Disk Management. Notice I have no system reserved. Notice that C is marked as "system".

Post a pic of Disk Management.

What choices do you see from the "action" menu and then "all tasks" in Disk Management, AFTER you highlight C?

johnlewismcleod said:

Unfortunately it auto-closes the action menus when I pick screen capture, so I can only list the select-able options:

The action tab offers:

Refresh

Rescan disks

Create VHD

Attach VHD

All tasks> Open, Explore, Change letter drive and paths, Shrink volume, and Properties.

Under All tasks there is a listing of Mark partition as active, but it's not select-able.

Are you sure this "non-selectable" is AFTER C is highlighted with the mouse.

Pic below shows my menu when I have highlighted my inactive D partition, showing the choice to make it active.

johnlewismcleod said:

Ah-hah!

I just noticed that it is listed as active in the drive info...it's just not tagged as Active like yours is.

Maybe it's already done and I don't need to do anything else but alter the tag discription

Can I do a valid boot test without erasing the original system section on D-drive, or do I need to commit and erase everything from D to know if I've accomplished my goal?

Are my eyes bad?

Don't I see "active" attached to the C drive in your picture?

Mark System Reserved as inactive and reboot.

Then, disconnect your D drive (pull the cables) and see if you can reboot.