Question about Windows 10 dual boot and need to change the boot partition

Friends of Easy_BCD,
Thanks for the great tool and community. My goal is to transfer my Windows 10 System to a new SSD on the same rig. I installed Easy_BCD on the old drive.

I have read that the new Windows 10 April/May/June 2018 upgrade may require a larger System Reserved partition to install, so that new partition size is increased to 3.6 Gigabytes (~10 times the old standard) on the new drive. In addition, the new SSD has the Windows partition (~830 Gigabytes) and the two small System Recovery partitions that appear on the old drive.
Using HD_Clone, I cloned each old partition onto the new drive's respective partition. There is automatic adjustment at the end of the clone that seems to be geared to resolving conflicts in device ID (?) etc.

The system boots onto the old drive (which has BIOS priority over the new drive) and I can see all drives and partitions in Computer Management/Storage utility. Note that the very original drive is still on the system, we'll call it the "data drive"; but it still retains its original System Reserved partition.

Booting to the old drive and using Easy_BCD, I added the new drive's installation partition to the boot menu, retaining the old drive's installation partition as default. System then goes through boot menu and boots fine to old drive as default.
When I reboot and select the new drive as boot drive from the boot menu, the system does start, but acts very flaky after giving me a pop-up error window:"sihost.exe - Unknown Hard Error" message and stumbles on for a while before I stop it. The disk activity seems to be on the new drive in this case (not the old drive), but a strange disk naming convention is sometimes used that makes reference to the original System Reserved partition on the data drive as a prefix to the partitions being referenced.

I am hopeful that Changing the Boot Partition or some other approach will allow me to straighten out this condition, but I am unclear as to how to proceed, and if the partition to be specified is the new System Reserved Partition or the new Windows installation partition, etc. I have no heartburn with having non-conflicting copies on multiple drives, and the above link seems to accommodate this. In addition, the BCD deployment feature of Easy_BCD seems somewhat relevant, with "Install BCD" and "Write MBR" operations.

If you cannot first suggest an obvious [test] approach with adequate detail to address this problem [that hopefully impacts only the new drive], please specify the additional information and screenshots that you need, and I will gladly provide it.

I appreciate your help on this.
Thanks
 
Don't start playing with those two options from the BCD deployment page !
Neither of them is relevant to your situation. They are for creating bootable external media (e.g.flashdrive) and restoring a Vista -> W10 style boot which has been (accidentally or deliberately) replaced by something like Linux or XP respectively, and inappropriate use of either will most likely destroy your working boot.
Changing the boot drive isn't going to fix the problem. You might want to do it anyway in future in order to decommission the old HDD OS, but that's another issue not related to the sihost error.
Concentrate on fixing that before you do anything else.
A web search of the error message reveals many hits which blame the problem on registry or disk corruption and suggest a number of possible solutions which would be worth trying while this new SSD W10 is not your main OS.
I would guess that the problem originates with the cloning software you used or the specific command within the partition manager. Different partition managers have different concepts of "clone" and from your OP it would seem that the one you used is carrying out "adjustments" which sounds like the end result is not a true clone.
It's been a long time since I upgraded an existing OS to a new drive so the wonderful world of partition manager foibles has probably moved on to even greater complexity.
Failing the above web-search suggestions, I'd suggest a very careful reading of the small print of your partition manager's manual for the exact purpose and action taken by each of the possible ways of moving/copying/cloning/backing-up/restoring partition images. It may be another option than the one you used is more appropriate.
Sorry not to be of any help with your specific problem, but hope I've steered you away from taking steps which might have borked your PC.
 
Don't start playing with those two options from the BCD deployment page !
Neither of them is relevant to your situation. They are for creating bootable external media (e.g.flashdrive) and restoring a Vista -> W10 style boot which has been (accidentally or deliberately) replaced by something like Linux or XP respectively, and inappropriate use of either will most likely destroy your working boot.
Changing the boot drive isn't going to fix the problem. You might want to do it anyway in future in order to decommission the old HDD OS, but that's another issue not related to the sihost error.
Concentrate on fixing that before you do anything else.
A web search of the error message reveals many hits which blame the problem on registry or disk corruption and suggest a number of possible solutions which would be worth trying while this new SSD W10 is not your main OS.
I would guess that the problem originates with the cloning software you used or the specific command within the partition manager. Different partition managers have different concepts of "clone" and from your OP it would seem that the one you used is carrying out "adjustments" which sounds like the end result is not a true clone.
It's been a long time since I upgraded an existing OS to a new drive so the wonderful world of partition manager foibles has probably moved on to even greater complexity.
Failing the above web-search suggestions, I'd suggest a very careful reading of the small print of your partition manager's manual for the exact purpose and action taken by each of the possible ways of moving/copying/cloning/backing-up/restoring partition images. It may be another option than the one you used is more appropriate.
Sorry not to be of any help with your specific problem, but hope I've steered you away from taking steps which might have borked your PC.
Terry60,
Thanks for your valuable insight and disaster prevention.
I will review another feature in HDClone which sounds more suitable: Disk Migration.
An essential attribute is the ability to adjust partition sizes, which I need to verify is available in Disk Migration. The previous way that I cloned partitions certainly allowed adjustable partitions, but likely was not intended for dual boot, etc. – per my pending review of the fine print. I may need to email the vendor as well for more details.
If any other readers can reinforce my guesswork, or suggest the ideal tool for this (I have also heard good thigs about Macrium Reflect), please let us know.

Thanks
 
ges_ez_BCD, the Windows System Restore and the Pagefile use fixed physical sectors in the HDD. I'm not sure my experience applies to your case but a while back, when I cloned a drive to a smaller one, I discovered that I needed to first disable System Restore and the Page file (in the original Windows installation) before cloning the HDD. In my case, I was cloning a 1TB HDD to a 500MB SDD for which I needed to shrink the original volume before cloning. After disabling those two items, I was able to shrink the volume in Disk Manager, clone the drive and only then Windows 10 booted properly on the SDD. After getting Windows to boot successfully on the SDD, I re-enabled System Restore and the Page file. With the SDD, the computer became much faster to boot and run (I'd say 10X). It's easy to find on the internet how to disable/enable those two items. Hope this helps.
 
Back
Top