Solved Problem converting two bootable drives to one

[jodzeee]

A few months ago I swapped out one of my drives for a new SSD and installed Windows 7 on it, installed all programs, configured everything, and gradually moved data over while still using the old one to get work done during the transition.

I'm at the point I'd like to wipe out the old drive and just use it for data; however, my PC seems to need that one to boot. I tried removing the drive and booting from a system repair disc, running the repair several times, to no avail.

In Disk Management, the one I don't want is showing as Disk 1: System, Active, Primary Partition; and the SSD I want to be booting off of is Disk 0: Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Logical Drive. There are no partitions.

Is there a way to fix this without having to completely reinstall or lose data/programs?

What would happen if I upgraded to Windows 10, would I still have the same issue (or worse)?

 

[jodzeee]

I found this and I think it pretty much describes my situation. Before I try it and break something, can someone advise if this will work?

Switching my Windows 7 Boot Disk from D to C with BCDBoot rather than BCDEdit - Scott Hanselman

 

[derekimo]

Welcome to the forum,

Can you post a screenshot of disk management,

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/274797-disk-management-post-screen-capture-image.html

It does sound like all you need to do is get the system and active flags moved to drive 0.

 

[jodzeee]

Here's the screenshot. I appreciate your help!

 

[derekimo]

Ah, that's why you can't get the system and active flags over there, disk 0 is a logical drive.

You need to convert that to primary before you can get it to boot from that drive,

Partition wizard bootable CD will do that,

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/93322-partition-wizard-use-bootable-cd.html

Option one above, and to be safe you should make sure everything is backed up on that drive first.

 

[jodzeee]

Thanks for your help! We finally got around to tackling this again, and were able to get C: set to a primary drive with your instructions. However, we couldn't figure out how to set it up as the system drive.

We tried booting from the repair disk 3 times and that didn't work.

Then in the command prompt, we tried bcdboot c:\windows /s c: (then ran the repair again 3 times), to no avail.

Next, we took out the D: drive completely, but couldn't get the repair disc to boot from C: Sometimes the repair would find errors, other times just fail.

Next, with the help of this thread:
http://www.sevenforums.com/installa...t-partition-without-reinstall.html#post517358

We typed

bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr

in the command prompt; then we were able to boot from C: (YAY!)

We inspected Disk Manager to make sure it was set up correctly, then put the other drive back in, checked to make sure it still booted correctly and looked good in Disk Manager.

Then just to be sure, ran this in the command prompt to make D: inactive

diskpart

sel vol d

inact

exi


Then checked everything again and it's working fine!

Thanks again and hope this might help others

 

[AddRAM]

You never set it Active, that`s why it wouldn`t write the system files to the ssd.

If you had unplugged the hard drive when you installed windows on the ssd, you would not have had any problems.

ALWAYS unplug all other drives when installing windows.