One of my Seagate 500 GB drives has gone haywire and I decided I better replace it before it crashes all together. So I got a WD 1T and used Minitool Partition Magic to transfer the WIN 7 OS to the new drive. I can see both drives in BIOS and Explorer but I cannot get the system to boot on the new drive by itself. So somehow Window Boot Manager is defaulting to the old drive. So my question is how do I get Boot Manager to boot off the new drive?
The FAT32 partition on the old drive says that it's active and boot and on the new drive it only says Active. The main partitions are NTFS.
I also made the new drive MBR instead of GPT.
Any input appreciated.
Did you copy everything to the new drive, including the "system reserved" partition from the old drive? The "system reserved" partition is marked "active" and is where Boot Manager lives. If you're planning on replacing the old drive then you must be sure you've copied everything you need to from the old drive to the new, and not just the Windows C-partition.
So, do you have a "system reserved" partition on the old drive? Or did you never have it because of your OS upgrade path over the years, and your Win7 C-partition on that drive truly was marked as "active" (indicating Boot Manager lived in the same partition as Windows itself)?
Please post a screenshot from DISKMGMT.MSC so that we can see exactly what your two-drive setup currently looks like. Can't really provide reliable advice unless we know what your two drives currently look like. Please full-screen the presentation and spread the columns so we can see the text in each cell, and then take the screenshot.
But for sure...
Go into the BIOS of your machine, and move the new drive up to the #1 position in the hard drive list.
Also, go into the "boot device sequence" and place the new drive as the first hard drive (probably should after USB key, CD/DVD, etc., so that you can boot from those other removable devices if you have to else it will go to your new hard drive).
And finally, if you used MiniTool's Partition Wizard (it's not named "Partition Magic", which is a similarly named but completely different old product that worked under WinXP but does not work any longer on Win7) to copy the Win7 OS partition to the new drive, be sure it is marked as "active" if this partition was marked "active" on the old drive. The BIOS looks for the "active" partition on the first hard drive listed in the boot sequence.
But if you had a "system reserved" partition on the old drive it would be the "active" partition. Again, if you're planning on removing the failing drive you want all of the old partitions copied over to the new drive, including this "system reserved" partition as well (and it then needs to be marked "active", not the Windows OS partition).
However I still question the status of "system reserved" partition on the old drive, as to whether or not you had one and whether or not you've copied it over to the new drive. Awaiting your screenshot.
