The system partition installed to the wrong drive

Disk 0, Disk 1, and Disk 2 all show 931.51 GB.

Disk 0 has a 100 MB system partition and the rest is unallocated.

Disks 1 and 2 are totally unallocated.

Disk 3 shows 1863.02 GB and is entirely allocated as my C drive and Windows installation.

I want the system partition moved from disk 0 to be on disk 3. I have boot order in BIOS set to boot to drive 3 first. If I unplug disk 0 then my system does not boot. I plan to remove drives 0, 1, and 2 at some point. I have no idea why this installed this way.

How can I fix this?

It probably happened because you had more than 1 hard drive connected when you installed Windows.

I'd disconnect drives 0, 1, and 2.

Then connect drive 3 to port 0 on the motherboard so that it will then become drive 0.

Then reinstall Windows to drive 3 with only drive 3 connected.

Reinstall Windows? There must be another way!

You could try to run System Repair, perhaps up to 3 times:

Startup Repair

Use Partition Wizard (PW) and EasyBCD. Both are free.

Also download and burn the standalone ISO bootable CD for PW.

Boot to the PW CD, and resize your DISK3 C-partition. Move it to the right by 100MB to free up 100MB unallocated at the left side of the drive. Or better, maybe just leave it where it is and shrink it by 100MB, thus freeing up 100MB unallocated at the right side of the drive.

Re-boot to Windows (still with DISK0 as first in the boot sequence), and use EasyBCD "backup/repair" function, and select "change boot drive" function. Follow the wizard to install Boot Manager on your DISK3. This will make use of the 100MB unallocated you previously freed on on DISK3.

Re-boot and get into BIOS, and now set DISK3 to be your boot drive. You will deal with the old "system reserved" on DISK0 later. This should work fine, from now on booting from the new "system reserved" partition you just built on DISK3 using EasyBCD.

Re-boot to Windows (this time it should come from DISK3 and its "system reserved") using Windows on DISK3. Once in Windows you can get into Partition and delete the "system reserved" from DISK0, and do whatever other maintenance you might want to do (e.g. to shrink your Windows C-partition down to maybe 150GB tops, with a second "data" partition on it, as well as allocating other partitions on your now three totally free drives DISK0, DISK1 and DISK2).

Note that if you do manipulate C using PW while booted to Windows, depending on the function PW may ask you to re-boot in order to allow it to complete all of the queued operations (since some may require that Windows not be operational in order to complete them). After boot-time kick in of PW to complete the operation, it will the continue on normally and Windows will come up with all of your previous session's queued operations now complete.

whs said:

Just copy the bootmgr to C. And here you get a free EasyBCD.

Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD

This is the simple solution. Once you've moved Bootmgr to C confirming that it is now labeled "System Active" in Disk Mgmt, power down to swap the disk0 cable to Win7 drive so that it now appears as Disk0 and is set first hard drive to boot in BIOS setup. This prevents any future repair from derailing the System boot files again to a preceding Primary partition.