adding an SSD problems

C

crasso

Member
I dual (or triple) boot WinXP, Win7 and Win10. When I boot into any of these 3, in DiskManagement and FileExplorer the partition for that OS becomes the C: drive. These are hard drive partitions, all on the same hard drive. Win7's hard drive boot partition is called WD2TB B.


Recently I got interested in adding a SATA SSD to my system. To get the SSD to even show on my computer I (per instructions) first connected it via aSATA-USB cable. Then I can see it in DiskManagement of Win7. I created a primary (bootable) partition naming in SSD1 and giving it letter V:. I then used and imaging app, Macrium, to restore aback-up-image of harddrive-Win7 into my new SSD partition disk V:.


I then shut down and connected the SSD to SATA cable 5 and booted harddrive-Win7. InEasyBCD I created a new entry for the BCD booting menu, calling it"Win7 on SSD" and pointing it at disk V:

When I used "Win7on SSD" Win7 does boot, but there are anomalies. FileExplorer is showing C: as being WD2TB B, I expected (wanted) it to be SSD1 on the V: drive. When I uninstall a program while I'm booted to "Win7on SSD" it also disappears on the regular hard-drive Win7installation!

I suspect this happened when I added my new BCD entry in EasyBVD by simply pointing it at V:

"Win7 on SSD"does boot a bit more snappily, I think it's actually using the SSD,but somehow it's also tied into the hard drive partition for Win7somehow. And I DON'T want it to be.
 
Post a screenshot of your Disk management when you think you're booted into the SSD.
 
I got a small step further. I no longer think the SSD partition got mis-named when I used EasyBCD to create a menu entry. I think it happened when I restored that Win7 partition image into the SSD partition. I got brave and re-named the SSD Volume from WD2TB B to its correct title SSD1, calling it drive V: still. I went through all my OS's making sure they all had Volume and drive letter correct. Then I booted hard-drive Win7, and again made a new menu entry for the SSD,pointing again at V: . I was sure it was gonna work this time!It didn't.
As requested here's the screen image for Disk Management while booted into my latest bcd menu entry for the SSD

https://i.postimg.cc/BvW8Pj0y/Win7-Disk-Manage-while-booted-to-V.png

It's still thinking that current OS C: is the hard drive partition of Win7. One of my programs refuses to run while the two partitions are linked like this, that was my initial tipoff something was wrong and a quick way for me to tell that the problem didn't get fixed.
 
That confirms that you are indeed running from the SSD (boot flag) but that the system is still booting from the HDD (system flag).

Disk Management flags have the following meanings on MBR/BIOS PCs

"boot" = "this is the system you're running"
"system" = "this is where I found the boot files for the currently running system"
"active" (on the first HDD in the BIOS boot sequence) = "this is where I started the search for the boot files"
"active" (on subsequent HDDs in the BIOS boot sequence) ="this is where I will look if I don't find something in the MBR on the first HDD"

I suspect that Macrium is the source of your problem. Different partition managers have a variety of ways of "copying" or "cloning" partitions some of which are not what they claim (a clone should be bit for bit identical with the source e.g.) and some are suitable only for data partitions not OSs.
Of those which are genuinely for copying OSs, some will "intelligently" modify the copy to make it bootable alongside the source. That appears to be what Macrium is doing here.
Not being a user of that software, I can only suggest that you examine the manual's small print with a sharp eye and try to find which of its command options will copy an OS without altering its identity in the registry.
Failing that, try another partition manager. There are some freely available online which might do what you want.
 
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