Two Active Partitions - No errors yet, but is this a problem?

If the preceding data partitions are Logical then you can Repair and Reinstall all you want and it cannot place the System boot files on the Logical partitions.

I missed that it was a laptop in the beginning, a common mistake. If you don't stop ankle-biting me, Brian, I am going to block you and you will disappear forever.

I've dealt with this very issue here thousands of times.

AddRAM said:

No, there is no software, if it boots fine by itself, you just put the ssd where the hard drive is, the hard drive is now on sata port 0.

Why are you making this so difficult ? I have explained it over and over again.

This is a laptop, THERE ARE NO CABLES, you just install the hard drive and slide it in to connect it to the connectors, there are no cables.

Sorry again. I've never had the luxury of having a laptop with two separate internal drives, so I am not familiar with the hardware. I thought perhaps you couldn't swap the two drives, that perhaps they might be different physical sizes or something. My bad!

I was pretty sure that there were no cables, since I actually *have* swapped hard drives in other laptops more than once. However, when others referred to cables I thought perhaps I was missing something.

BTW, I've found some interesting information elsewhere in this site that may be applicable - will post as soon as I've caught up with the other feedback.

whs said:

I think I know what happened here. When they installed the OS on the SSD, they did not disconnect the HDD. And since the installer has this habit of grabbing the first disk it finds to place the bootmgr, it landed on the HDD.

If you ever reinstall the OS on the SSD, you have to pull the HDD out. Or do what Brian and Greg recommend which is swapping the SSD and HDD in the disk bays.

Yes, I think you are right. I've seen articles and posts that confirm that Windows will write the System files to the earliest Primary Partition it finds.

First of all, thank you all for pitching in and being responsive, and for not cursing me out despite any teeth-gnashing I may have inspired

Second, I found some very interesting information about drive numbers versus SATA port numbers and the fact that apparently drive numbers can sometimes change from one boot up to the next. At least this was true in a number of threads on this Forum a few years ago, as written by people who are way smarter than me in this area.

Don't Know Why

Diskpart / Disk Management vs the BIOS

SATA port numbers vs assignemnt of Disk numbers/

Diskpart / Disk Management vs the BIOS

The gist is that you can't count on the physical SATA port number to always correspond to the drive number, and that sometimes drive numbers will change for no apparent reason so what used to be Drive 1 is suddenly Drive 0 and vice versa.

They also pointed me to the following KB:
Article ID: 937251 - Last Review: January 16, 2014 - Revision: 7.0

Disk drive numbers may not correspond to the SATA channel numbers when you install Windows on a computer that has multiple SATA or RAID disks


There were some choice quotes in this one:


"Devices are presented in the order in which they are enumerated. Therefore, the disk assignment numbers may change between startups. The enumeration order may change over time between system boots, depending on timing factors such as aging hard disks taking slightly longer to spin up.

You may experience this problem if you configure the operating system during installation or if you perform a recovery process that was provided by the computer manufacturer. This problem may also occur during regular computer startup. Therefore, hard disks may have different disk numbers across multiple system startups.

Additionally, when you install Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, or Windows 7, the installation creates a system partition alongside the Windows partition by default. The system partition is created to accommodate a BitLocker requirement. BitLocker requires that the boot files and Windows files are located on separate partitions. If the preselected default hard disk is not changed, the system partition is created on the disk that is detected as Disk 0.

Microsoft has confirmed that this problem occurs because of design limitations in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. This problem occurs because drives are enumerated in the order in which they are presented to the operating system through Plug and Play. Any apparent consistency in disk numbering is coincidental and/or a side effect of the equipment and drivers used."




Don'cha just love it!

Did you see this one too? OS disk not disk 0 - Windows 7 Help Forums

This is why it may be easier just to assure your data partitions are Logical.

gregrocker said:

Did you see this one too? OS disk not disk 0 - Windows 7 Help Forums

Hadn't seen that thread, but it eventually references the same MS KB article as the others - and the 2014 date on the article says this hasn't changed

gregrocker said:

This is why it may be easier just to assure your data partitions are Logical.

Yup - only having 1 Primary partition looks like the only way to permanently address this

Right now all 3 of my HDD data partitions are Primary ones
- I assume I can change the two that don't contain System files to Logical right away
- For the one that has System files on it, do I need to move them first and then change it to Logical? I would assume so, but I have made it clear that I am no expert

Once you move the Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD,

reboot while setting the Win7 drive first hard drive to boot in BIOS setup.

Once it boots, in Disk Mgmt confirm the System Active flags are on C.

Then you can mark Data partition Inactive if EasyBCD doesn't do that for you: Partition - Mark as Inactive - Windows 7 Forums

So that you can then set the 3 data partitions Logical with Partition Wizard.