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11 Posts
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8012
February 24th, 2011 08:00
change boot partition
I currently have 3 partitions on my factory install 2TB drive- utility, recovery and Win 7. I'm trying to install a much smaller (SSD 200 GB) as the primary OS drive and don't want to just clone the drive, since the recovery partition is 15GB. Since the utility partition is tiny I thought I would clone it and the Windows 7 partition. My question what do I have to do to insure the Windows 7 partition is still booting on the new drive, since it will be the second partition instead of the third partition. If the other two partitions are hidden will the SSD drive behave the same as my current drive, e.g. boot the first visible partition? Or will I have to use BCDEditor?
Thanks for any input.
Michael
Tom Green
322 Posts
0
February 24th, 2011 09:00
On you 2TB drive the boot files were more likely on the recovery
partition and not the win7 partition. So most likely yes you will
have to do the bcdboot.exe on the new drive as it will not have
the recovery partition on it. It's not a real problem to boot
from the win7 partition just have to have something like winpe
or recovery disk to use to get to a command prompt to run it.
If your windows 7 is still working go to start then maintance
and make a recovery cd and you will have a boot winpe.
Make sure it will boot before you start. You need this CD
anyhow to recover any system problems you might have later.
Tom
Tom Green
322 Posts
0
February 24th, 2011 09:00
Hello itinko
First make sure you have a winpe boot disk or flash drive.
Win7 boots to active partition it must be ntfs and dell utility
is a FAT partition, so you will need to make the win7 partition
active. after it is installed you will have to boot from disk or
flash drive and go to commant prompt and change to
c:\windows\system32
and run
bcdboot.exe c:\windows
this will create the boot files for your windows7.
Hope this helps.
Tom
itinko
11 Posts
0
February 24th, 2011 09:00
Thanks for your reply Tom.
Do I still have to do the bcdboot.exe? I'm cloning an existing install which has been in use for months (that's why I don't want to do a new install).
Thanks!
M.