Hi Terry,
Thanks for your excellent description of how this stuff really works. I have been working on a
TEST HP Server 2012 R2 that does not have UEFI bios. Consequentially my raid array 1+0 is limited in size due to the disk being MBR based. I currently have close to 500 Gig's of unallocated space. I found an internal USB port right in the middle of the system board. I figured why not Change the Boot drive to a USB flash drive. Then convert the logical raid drive to GPT. Then I can merge the unallocated space in. This has not worked out so well.
First of all EasyBCD does not support removable drives for the reasons already mentioned by Mahmoud. So I went at it using the same Microsoft tools that EasyBCD uses. I got very close. It was Primary and Active with the boot files installed. I pointed the boot manager device partition to the flash drive and was able to boot from the drive but once back in windows, the boot manager device partition was unknown. I had to eject and insert the drive again to get Windows and BCD to see it. This is no good. BTW, the flash drive never had the System flag.
However, I decided to see if I could proceed with the disk conversion to GPT. I am using Aeomi Partition Assistant Server Edition. I created a boot CD for that program. It is using WinPE. Once inside the program, I wiped out the old System Reserve Partition and converted the raid logical drive to GPT. It warned me that I did not have a system partition and my system will not boot. I proceeded anyway because I had successfully booted from the USB flash drive. Well guess what, the system would not boot anymore from the flash drive. The dreaded boot manager missing.
This was odd because the flash drive was correct and the boot manager device partition was pointed correctly. Not to mention that I was able to boot from it. I recovered the system by converting the GPT disk back to MBR with Aeomi and recreating the System Reserve Partition. Then booting to the repair command prompt with my Windows installation DVD. Then finally running bcdboot D:\Windows, bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /fixboot, bootrec /rebuildbcd. Good news this was a test server.
I have given up on the flash drive approach. I found a 16 GB SSD SATA drive on Amazon for $11. I will use this to accomplish my mission. Honestly it is a much cleaner approach especially when I do this on the production server. Here is what I am purchasing...
https://www.amazon.com/KingDian-Int...UTF8&qid=1549252587&sr=8-2&keywords=16+gb+ssd
Terry I do have one question for you. You say that the virtual system flag is assigned by the OS once up and running. I have no reason to doubt you on this. However I am fairly certain that the system flag was present on the original System Reserve Partition (AKA the raid logical disk) when I booted from my WinPE Aoemi Partition Assistant CD. If system flag is virtual, then why would I see it from boot CD? Do you think that the WinPE boot environment set the system flag? Please advise and thank you for your support...