No, I meant I started a thread on social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/category/w8itpro as request in the prev post. The old hdd was in bad shape, they got a new one, i attached the old one so they could copy all their files from the old to new. If many family members are using a PC, it makes a lot of sense to have one drive for each and let each look after their own drive.
wow, so the big crowd of the family has to quew one after the other to access the one and only PC? Funny situation imao. Would't it be better to run at least two or three different machines to provide simultaneous access for the most of the crew?
Conventional systems are limited to 24partitions and this is directly related to the windows method of using drive letters . obviousely virtual systems are not limited by this problem .but the OP exceeded the number in any event ,that in itself should not cause the system to fail to boot , but the fact that a HDD was added could . it depends what was on the partitions in the new system , if an OS was present ,then it may have been off another PC and drivers would have been incompatible . adding partitions to a drive is no problem ,even adding OSs are no problem ,but a already partitioned HDD added to an existing system requires drive mapping , unfortunately the bios often sees the drives differently to windows ,and its not unusual to have windows trying to boot from the wrong system . I have been using a software called HyperOS since 2003 , I was able to use up to 24 partitions ,even back then ,and could choose to have OSs on all of the partitions , then we had to have the first partition primary and the rest as logical .but now I have all of my drives on logical even the first OS (C) , HyperOS would automatically do drive mapping when a new drive was installed , but as with a single drive the total number of partitions were allways limited to 24 , a few years ago ,HyperOS came up with their own method to add more than 24 , and an OS can be added to any or all , they used a sort of virtual method where by there is an additional folder on each "normal" partition that any additional drives are referenced to that , now the amount of drives are limited only by the amount of space . someone asked "why" ,and "what are all the partitions used for . in the early days ,hard drives were small ,OSs were getting bigger and system restore was iffy at best , I could "back in 2003-5" , have a system with multi OS windows 98 , 2k ,XP on different drives , and use other partitions for dedicated files (one for photos,one for music) etc. you get the idea ,each drive was set up to store the photos on the same partition and so on . HyperOS had (in those days) a great sector copy backup system ,and a large partition was kept for backups of all or just some select OSs , In the event of a catastrophic failure (crash/blue screen etc.) I could quickly and simply reboot into one of the other working systems and using the HyperOS (my other computers folder) I can (drag and drop) the backup for that OS or an alternative clean backup of the same or different OS ,and it will restore and reboot back to the original partition , I can do this in the knowledge that all of the files (photos/music/downloades/docs etc.) are safe and sound in thier own dedicated Partitions . by using these methods ,the Idea is to keep the OSs themselves small and lean ,and they dont get cluttered and work more efficiently . I could easily setup periodic automatic backups too . so there was a very good reason for using a multi OS multi partition in this way , though recently with win 8 (not supported) where the tools are available to perform the same tasks and use similar methods without the need for a dedicated software .
Either you have 24 disks that belong in a NAS in the first place or you're partitioning few disks way too much. If you have 24 partitions in Windows, you're doing it wrong. Period.