Can EasyBCD help with this problem?

bat123man

New Member
Hi,

I have a dual boot system with XP and Win7. I don't care about the WinXP installation, I haven't used it in years. I recently purchased Win8, and want to dual-boot with Win7. I have tried and tried, but Win8 can't get around where the System drive is. When I originally installed XP, I installed it onto a 500 GB HD. It made that both the System and Boot drives. I subsequently upgraded to Vista a few years later, and bought a new drive. The system drive remained on the original 500 GB HD, and my new drive was used for the Vista boot drive. When I bought Win7, I completely removed Vista (formated that drive), and bought a new SSD for Win7. Win7 was perfectly happy to use the old 500 GB HD as the System drive, and the new SSD was now my OS boot drive.

I have just purchased Win8. I thought since it had worked so well in the past, I may as well buy a new SSD for Win8, and dual boot with Win7 on its own SSD. The problem is apparently the new Windows Boot Manager doesn't like my arrangement. It cannot handle the System partition being on an entirely separate drive. It allows me to install Win8, but when it comes time to reboot, it crashes 3 times in succession and tells me it can't recover. If I then go into my BIOS and change my boot drive to be the Win7 SSD, good old Win7 starts right up without a problem. I have tried to get Win8 going multiple times, but the stumbling block seems to be the fact that the Boot Manager is still on that old 500 GB HD.

The only sure bet I can think of is to partition the new SSD into 2 halves, reinstall Win7 from scratch onto the first half, and then install Win8 onto the second half. That will build me a brand new boot manager on the new SSD (I'll be sure to disconnect all other drives during this operation). However, I would rather not do that. If I install EasyBCD, will it allow me to move the Boot Manager to the SSD instead of leaving it on the 500 GB HD ?

Other attempts :
I tried to clone the Win7 SSD onto the new 120 GB SSD using EasyUS. That worked just fine, the drive was cloned. But when I rebooted the machine (and pulled the SATA cable from all drives except the new SSD), it said non-system or missing boot drive. So I booted to the Win7 DVD, and requested that it repair my SSD install, but that didn't work. It ran for 10 mins, and said, OK, I think it may have worked, go ahead and reboot". But when I rebooted, non-system disk or missing boot drive error again. I reconnected all drives, and good old Win7 came back up again.

My drives :
500 GB SATA 7200 HD which still has XP (in win7 Computer Management, it is listed as Healthy, System, Active, Primary Partition)
80 GB SSD with Win7 installed (in CM, listed as Healthy, boot, primary)
120 GB SSD with new Win7 cloned to it (in CM, listed as Healthy, primary) - boot NOT listed
1.5 TB external USB drive


Thanks,
BM.
 
Yes you can copy the boot files across using EasyBCD
Changing the Boot Partition - EasyBCD - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki
There shouldn't be a problem booting W8 from boot files located anywhere as long as they're its boot files
See
Dual Boot/

Disk Management flags have the following meanings

"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"
 
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