Safe to put the BootMGR files on main drive?

Alejandro85 said:

Gandolf said:

Layback Bear said:

Here is a tutorial by whs that should be helpful to you.

By whs:
Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD

Is it safe though? I mean, there must be a reason that Microsoft created a separate partition to house it.

There is a reason, actually. It's to support BitLocker full-disk encryption that's part of Windows. When it's active the normal system partition is encrypted, hence unreadable, so nothing can boot from it. That problem is solved with the"system reserved" partition, which is always left unencryptedl and holds the bootloader. It boots from there, initializes the encryption system and then decrypts and reads the rest of the system.
Even if BitLocker is not used, Windows will create, by default, that annoying partition. There it boot from there and just transfer control to the normal system.

By just copying bootmgr will not suffice for a sucesfull boot. You need to copy the whole contents of the system-reserved to the main drive. You also need to make the drive bootable with the Windows 6.x MBR code, that can be done with the "bootsect" utility included in the Windows installation disk.
I've never tried doing that but my supposition is that those things will make a partition bootable and Windows will start from there.

I only copied the BootMGR and I got a successful boot.

Gandolf said:

I only copied the BootMGR and I got a successful boot.

You're holding back... surely you did more than that, although you never actually told us exactly what you did other than "I put the BootMGR on my C drive and transferred the C drive to my new SSD. Everything worked out perfectly, thanks guys!".

So, did you use EasyBCD to do that? Or not? If you did use EasyBCD then not only would ALL the components of Boot Manager (including its menu, with one or more bootable OS's on it) get copied from "system reserved" to C, but also the target C-partition would be marked "active". Then if you copied that C-partition to the SSD it, too, would be marked "active".

Or, if you didn't use EasyBCD, then what exact component(s) did you copy when you said "I put the Boot MGR on my C drive"? One file? Multiple files? What?

Finally, since the "system reserved" partition on the spinner is marked "active" and the C-partition is not, if you simply copied the original spinner-C over to become the SSD-C that by itself would not make the partition bootable. You had to do at least a bit more, in order to make the C-partition now residing on the SSD bootable. So did you use some other program to do that? Partition Wizard? Something else?

There is a possibility that the BIOS might default to the one-and-only partition on the one-and-only hard drive as the boot partition to find Boot Manager, even if it's not officially marked "active". I don't know this for sure, as I've never had an environment without a proper "active" partition in which Boot Manager officially lives, either Win98 C, or "system reserved" for Win7. But if this isn't true, and you haven't yourself marked the SSD C as "active", I don't know how you could be booting successfully. Unless you used some other program/utility to accomplish the copy from spinner to SSD which simultaneously marked it as "active".


Anyway, I'm sure your current SSD environment is successful as you say it is. But it would be great if you could just flesh out your story a bit, providing the actual details of how you "just copied BootMGR to C".

Did you use EasyBCD or some other program product or did you do something manual yourself?

And how did you get the C-partition on the SSD to be marked "active"?

Thanks if you would please finish the story, as it probably would be very helpful to someone else looking at this thread sometime down the road.

dsperber said:

Gandolf said:

I only copied the BootMGR and I got a successful boot.

You're holding back... surely you did more than that, although you never actually told us exactly what you did other than "I put the BootMGR on my C drive and transferred the C drive to my new SSD. Everything worked out perfectly, thanks guys!".

So, did you use EasyBCD to do that? Or not? If you did use EasyBCD then not only would ALL the components of Boot Manager (including its menu, with one or more bootable OS's on it) get copied from "system reserved" to C, but also the target C-partition would be marked "active". Then if you copied that C-partition to the SSD it, too, would be marked "active".

Or, if you didn't use EasyBCD, then what exact component(s) did you copy when you said "I put the Boot MGR on my C drive"? One file? Multiple files? What?

Finally, since the "system reserved" partition on the spinner is marked "active" and the C-partition is not, if you simply copied the original spinner-C over to become the SSD-C that by itself would not make the partition bootable. You had to do at least a bit more, in order to make the C-partition now residing on the SSD bootable. So did you use some other program to do that? Partition Wizard? Something else?

There is a possibility that the BIOS might default to the one-and-only partition on the one-and-only hard drive as the boot partition to find Boot Manager, even if it's not officially marked "active". I don't know this for sure, as I've never had an environment without a proper "active" partition in which Boot Manager officially lives, either Win98 C, or "system reserved" for Win7. But if this isn't true, and you haven't yourself marked the SSD C as "active", I don't know how you could be booting successfully. Unless you used some other program/utility to accomplish the copy from spinner to SSD which simultaneously marked it as "active".


Anyway, I'm sure your current SSD environment is successful as you say it is. But it would be great if you could just flesh out your story a bit, providing the actual details of how you "just copied BootMGR to C".

Did you use EasyBCD or some other program product or did you do something manual yourself?

And how did you get the C-partition on the SSD to be marked "active"?

Thanks if you would please finish the story, as it probably would be very helpful to someone else looking at this thread sometime down the road.

Sorry about that :P. I used EasyBCD to move everything and cloned my C drive (which had all the boot files on it) to the SSD.

Gandolf said:

Sorry about that :P. I used EasyBCD to move everything and cloned my C drive (which had all the boot files on it) to the SSD.

AHA! Excellent. EasyBCD wins again.

Thank you.


Note... one more loose end.

People very often casually talk about "C drive", but technically speaking it's really "C partition", or maybe "the partition on your hard drive with a drive letter of C". It's easy to use these terms interchangeably and casually, but sometimes it's ambiguous and imprecise. If you only have one hard drive it's easy to think of it as your "C drive", although we realize it can have other partitions on it which may (or may not) have their own drive letters other than C.

Now I'm guessing that after using EasyBCD to migrate Boot Manager into your spinner C-partition, you perhaps neglected to physically delete the old (and now obsolete, unused and unnecessary) "system reserved" partition on the spinner. But maybe you did delete it. Anyway, it certainly has no purpose any longer, either on the spinner or on the new SSD, so you presumably didn't copy ("clone") it to the new SSD when you did copy ("clone") the now bootable C-partition.

When you say you "cloned your C drive", you can see why that's a bit vague. You don't have a "C drive". You actually have a [spinner] hard drive with a now bootable C-partition on it, and maybe (or maybe not) also a small "system reserved" partition on it. But it's only the bootable C-partition which deserves to now be on the SSD.

For sure, it's now no longer necessary to have the "system reserved" partition around at all, either residually on the old spinner or on the new SSD, since it now serves no purpose at all. But it does take a manual action on your part to delete it since EasyBCD consciously doesn't do that for you (since some unexpected problem might develop and you might want to reactivate it again for use). So if you plan to use the entire old SSD as a newly repurposed data drive (with one or more data partitions on it) I'm sure you've just now deleted all partitions (with Partition Wizard? something else?) and created one or more data partitions on it (lettered D or whatever you have changed it to), now that you're booting from the SSD.

Finally, when you say "cloned" you probably used some 3rd-party software product to do that: Macrium Reflect, Partition Wizard, even maybe the software utility which came with the Samsung SSD to do just that type of thing. Which was it? The Samsung software knows that the partition copied to the SSD must be marked "active" and will do that for you. The Macrium Reflect software also does that as part of its "clone" function, if the source partition itself is "active". I don't know if Partition Wizard's "copy partition" function will also set the resulting partition "active" if the source partition was, but certainly PW can be used to mark the partition "active" after the fact.