How do I move the boot files?

T

tomkemp

Member
When I initially installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit from the DVD to a new hard drive there was another hard drive powered up in the PC that contained Vista. So, when the Windows 7 install saw that it automatically created a dual boot scenario which, at the time, I thought was very cool. However, Vista is long gone and I want to be able to back up the Windows 7 Ultimate C drive and have all the files necessary on the drive so that if it has to be restored I don't need the boot files that now exist on what is now just a data drive or so I thought.

Here is the basic problem:

The Windows 7 C drive has the following status:

Healthy (Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

While a data drive has the following status:

Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)

The data drive should just be Healthy (Primary Partition)

Is there some easy way that EasyBCD can modify the appropriate files so that I can move Bootmgr and bootsect.bak from the data drive to the Windows 7 C boot drive? I don't want to have to back up a 750 GB data drive just to ensure that I have a restorable copy of Windows 7 Ultimate for backup? I'm sure that there is more to it than my simple proposed scenario.

Many thanks,
Tom
 

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Mahmoud/Terry:

Mahmoud - I assume that you mean BCD Backup/Repair. Is that correct? Can it really be this easy? Doesn't the MBR have to be altered as well? And, what about the issue of that data drive showing System, Active? Will EasyBCD eliminate that status from that data drive as well?

Terry:

The first drive in the boot order is already the C drive and I would assume that because it can't boot from there it checks every one of the hard drives until it finds BOOTMGR and/or whatever files it needs to successfully boot.

Many thanks,
Tom
 
You don't have to worry about *any* of that. EasyBCD takes care of it all for you! It's probably my favorite feature in all of EasyBCD :grinning:

You're confusing drives with disks. The physical hard disk with the drive that you select to be your boot drive needs to be the first disk in the BIOS boot order.
 
I ran EasyBCD this morning. GREAT program. I see that the bootmgr file now also exists on the C drive. However, bootsect.bak with an old date of 3/2/10 and bootmgr with today's date also still exist on the data drive as well. That is apparently causing Symantec Ghost 15.0 to think that it also needs to copy that 750GB data drive to ensure that I would have a bootable OS should I have to do a restore. Can I just delete the bootmgr and (?) the bootsect.bak files from the data drive? I would think that would fix the Ghost program "problem". Interestingly enough the Windows 7 System Backup function doesn't have that problem now which is as it should be I would think.

I "thought" that bootsec.bak was also a required file that should also be on the C drive now that I have run EasyBCD. Is that incorrect?

Also, that data drive that previously had a status of System, Active, Primary Partition now has a status of Active, Primary Partition. See drive profile attachment following the EasyBCD run. Can I just disable the Active status without losing the data on the drive?

Many thanks for a GREAT program. Surely there must be a way to donate some money.

Thanks,
Tom
 

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There's no problem (it's quite normal) to have an active partition on each HDD (or flashdrive). It has no effect unless you put it at the top of the boot sequence, in which case the MBR uses it as a pointer to the next part of the boot. You can switch it off or leave it. No problem either way.
"Change boot drive" copies (not moves) the boot files, leaving the original untouched till you're happy with the move.
You can delete the redundant \boot folder and bootmgr whenever you're ready.
You can delete any .bak file when you want the space.
There's a donate entry under "help"
 
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