Changing boot drive

[CJM]

I've upgraded my machine at some point in the last year, where I added a new
500GB drive and moved my C: partition across to it. The previous 250GB drive
was left in for additional storage.

Just recently (while upgrading my BIOS) I realised that my system was still
booting from the 250GB drive even though Windows was on the other disk.

There is a fair possibility in the not too distant future that I'll replace
the 250GB disk with a larger disk, in which case I won't be able to boot. Is
there a safe and reliable way to change it so that the system boots from the
500GB disk?

CJM

 

[DL]

FYI
The reason for this being that after cloneing a drive you have to shutdown,
disconnect the old C drive, if neccessary set the new drive as master then
reboot. Then shutdown a connect old drive as slave, before rebooting.
Currently I would suspect your old drive is still C and your win drive has
another letter

I know how to correct this in winxp but unsure about the Vista process
Its to do with the Master Boot record still being on the old C

 

[CJM]

FYI
The reason for this being that after cloneing a drive you have to
shutdown, disconnect the old C drive, if neccessary set the new drive as
master then reboot. Then shutdown a connect old drive as slave, before
rebooting.
Currently I would suspect your old drive is still C and your win drive has
another letter

No, my windows partition is definitely C:...

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

The old drive is still the active one. You have to change the active volume
in disk manager (diskmgmt.msc) and then run a startup repair, preferably
with the old drive temporarily detached.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

But that does not make it the boot drive.

No, my windows partition is definitely C:...

 

[CJM]

But that does not make it the boot drive.

Quite.

Which takes me back to my original question... How do I set the disk
containing my current drive C to be the boot disk?

 

[CJM]

Hi,

The old drive is still the active one. You have to change the active
volume in disk manager (diskmgmt.msc) and then run a startup repair,
preferably with the old drive temporarily detached.

Rick,

I thought an active volume was the volume on a disk (containing one or more
other volumes) that was marked as the bootable volume? That is, there can be
one active volume per physical disk...

[I've just checked... this is correct - one volume per disk can be marked as
Active]

I'm not sure what you mean by a 'startup repair'. Coul you please elaborate?

Thanks

Chris

 

[Spirit]

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/5c59f8c1-b0d1-4f1a-af55-74f3922f3f351033.mspx

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial148.html

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6131173.html

Hi,

The old drive is still the active one. You have to change the active
volume in disk manager (diskmgmt.msc) and then run a startup repair,
preferably with the old drive temporarily detached.

Rick,

I thought an active volume was the volume on a disk (containing one or
more other volumes) that was marked as the bootable volume? That is, there
can be one active volume per physical disk...

[I've just checked... this is correct - one volume per disk can be marked
as Active]

I'm not sure what you mean by a 'startup repair'. Coul you please
elaborate?

Thanks

Chris

 

[David B.]

None of this applies to the SATA interface

 

[cvp]

First, a little terminology:
What you appear to be talking about is the "System" drive (which your
BIOS will "boot" to, not the "Boot" drive which actually contains the
system.

You can easily check this by looking in Disk Manager and checlking which
one is labeled as "System" and which is labeled "Boot"

There are several ways to fix this, but the easiest is to copy from the
"System" drive to the "Boot" drive:
Bootmgr
Boot directory
Both of those are hidden/system so make sure you can view such files.
Then, go into your machine's BIOS settings and change the Boot priority
of the hard drives (there are several different terminologies so
interpret this freely). Make the drive with your system on it (the
"Boot" drive) the first in the drive sequence.

Then boot from your dvd and choose "repair" instead of "Install" and fix
up the boot files (I can't remember the exact terminology)

 

[David B.]

Everyone is forgetting something, irregardless of IDE or SATA, newer BIOS's
have the option to select which hard drive is the first boot drive, no
matter where it is on the cable or what it's jumper is set to, this needs to
be set correctly as well.

 

[cvp]

I should have added in the last step, unplug the former "System" drive
before performing the repair

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Everyone is forgetting something, irregardless of IDE or SATA,
newer BIOS's have the option to select which hard drive is the
first boot drive, no matter where it is on the cable or what it's
jumper is set to, this needs to be set correctly as well.

By checking the User's Manuals of the current PC offerrings
at Dell, it seems that the *older* BIOSes allow the user to set
the Hard Drive Boot Order. At last check (a month ago), I
found only 2 desktop PCs which allowed that, and all the rest
just allowed setting which HD was "enabled". My 8-year old
Dell desktop allowed setting the Hard Drive Boot Order (i.e.
allowed defining which HD was "rdisk(0)", "rdisk(1)", "rdisk(2)",
and "rdisk(3)", and it allows great flexibility in multi-booting and
cloning operations. But the new ones don't seem to be as flexible.
OTOH, being able to set which HDs are "enabled" would aid in
"hiding" the parent OS when starting up its clone for its first run.
The presence of the RAID option seemed to coincide with the
lack of Hard Drive Boot Order settability, and that may be due
to RAID rendering the Boot Order moot.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Disk Manager can set the "active" flag for a Primary
partition on its local disk. That marks the partition which
contains the Boot Sector that invokes the boot manager.
In the OP's case, he hasn't designated which HD should
have its MBR get control at boot up. The way that that
is done depends on the particular BIOS in the machine.

*TimDaniels*

 

[CJM]

I have a P5B Delux mobo, which allows me to rank my HDDs in order; the top
drive is then made available in a Boot Priority list (alongside optical
drives and floppies).

If I specify my newer 500GB drive, the BIOS fails to find a bootable drive.
If I specify the older 250GB disk, the BIOS boots into the Windows volume on
the bigger drive.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I notice that the P5B Deluxe Asus board has 8 SATA connectors
and 1 PATA connector. What types are the two HDs? Is the
SATA controller enabled? Can you access the 500GB HD
when running the OS on the 250GB HD?

*TimDaniels*

 

[CJM]

I notice that the P5B Deluxe Asus board has 8 SATA connectors
and 1 PATA connector. What types are the two HDs? Is the
SATA controller enabled? Can you access the 500GB HD
when running the OS on the 250GB HD?

Tim,

I'm using SATAII only off the 6 Southbridge ports (and not the extra JBOD
ports). There is no OS on the old drive anymore; the OS is on the newer
drive, but I'm required to instruct the BIOS to boot from the older drive in
order to get it to boot.

[Incidently, there are 4 additional SATA drives installed (2.25TB total),
along with 1xSATA DVD and 1xIDE DVD]

Things are running fine - for now - but it is entirely feasable that I will
replace either of these two much-discussed drives in the not too distant
future, so a) I don't want to find I can't boot, and b) I dont want to get
into the same situation again if I replace the current OS drive.

CJM

 

[andy]

I've upgraded my machine at some point in the last year, where I added a new
500GB drive and moved my C: partition across to it. The previous 250GB drive
was left in for additional storage.

Just recently (while upgrading my BIOS) I realised that my system was still
booting from the 250GB drive even though Windows was on the other disk.

There is a fair possibility in the not too distant future that I'll replace
the 250GB disk with a larger disk, in which case I won't be able to boot. Is
there a safe and reliable way to change it so that the system boots from the
500GB disk?

First run Disk Management, and set the primary partition on the 500GB
disk drive to active.
Then remove the 250GB drive, and follow steps 2 through 15 at

 

[CJM]

First run Disk Management, and set the primary partition on the 500GB
disk drive to active.
Then remove the 250GB drive, and follow steps 2 through 15 at

Thanks Andy - good instructions - I'll have a go tonight.

CJM