Hi I have a 160Gig as drive 0 and I installed a 1Tb drive that I installed Windows 8.1 WMC on about two weeks ago. I now want to remove the 160Gig drive. I have tried removing the drive and putting the 1Tb drive on SATA port 0 but it will not boot I used Computer Manager to set the 1Tb drive active. It shows as boot but still it will not boot from this drive. Once I put the 160Gig back in it boots fine. Is there any way to do this without reinstalling windows 8.1 WMC.
Is there any reason why you can't leave both drives in the computer? Then you could run Windows from the smaller HD and put all your stuff (music, photos, movies, etc.) on the 1TB HD.
When you view the drives in "Disk Management", does the 160GB show as "boot"? That would explain why you need it to boot. I think EasyBCD can make the 1TB the boot drive, but I am not an expert on using it and using it the wrong way will ensure you'll have to start fresh.
If I understand what he did, he switched the SATA cable from 1 to 0. That won't do the job. He needs to go into his bios and set the boot drive to the HD that he wants to be the boot device.
I tried startup repair and it came back with an error. And no I did not just changed the cable from 1 to 0 I used Windows disk managment tool to change the drive to active which put the drive as boot drive. I will upload a photo of disk managment Rock. I think last time with Windows 8 I used a thrid party disk managment tool to fix it. but not sure. I want to put the 160Gig drive in my server. Because the drive in it is starting to fail.
So, the 1TB drive is split into two data partitions, neither of which contains the OS, yet one of those partitions is labeled "boot", while the OS is on the 160GB drive? I hope an expert on drive/partition management can contribute, looks like a mess to me. Hope you get it fixed.
As you installed Windows 8.1 on the 1TB HDD, were the 160GB HDD still as drive 0 in the machine and running?
your bcd store is located in disk 0 system reserved partition and the boot manager uses it to tell where your windows files are . so when you removed disk 0, it wouldnt know what to do. you need to create a new bcd store and save it to your new 1tb drive before removing the 160gb drive: - open a cmd prompt as admin - type in this command and press enter: bcdboot c:\windows /s c: (make sure c: contains \windows directory) - now turn off system, remove old drive and reboot hope that helps
Lt is correct. I'd even go further by pulling out the 160GB, Booting into WinPE & running the BCDBOOT command from there.
I removed the 160Gig and reinstalled Windows already. But thanks for the info. Next time I will try that.
You need to make the 1tb drive the "ACTIVE" partition, and then run bcdboot pointing at the target windows folder. Example: d:\windows\system32\bcdboot d:\windows To make the d drive the active partition you gotta run diskpart: select volume d active You might or might not need to select disk first... I'm not sure..