Hi. Glad to have found this place. Been reading up a lot but still not sure I have an answer to my particular question, so here goes.
Got an older PC dual-booting Win7 and Win8. It has a series of old, smaller HDDs, several of which are beginning to fail. First is the Win 8 drive, then a drive with two partitions, one of which is the Win 7 drive. Then another 3 drives with data, files etc. Total of 9 partitions/ drive letters over 5 drives. All of the drives are small (200GB or 300GB). They are older SATA drives except the Win 8 drive, which is IDE/ATA. I used it as the Win 8 drive because no matter how I configured the BIOS setup, the system looked there for the boot files. If the boot files weren't there, the system wouldn't boot. Not sure "boot files" is the right term, but I'm referring to the BCD and all else needed to avoid the 0xc000000f error on startup.
I just broke down and bought a 4TB drive and a 750GB drive (both SATA). I would like to move the two OSes to two partitions on the 750GB drive and put all the data and files on the 4TB.
So, I format the 750GB with two primary partitions, then one primary on the 4TB. But, after I format and partition the drives, what do I do? If I clone the Win 8 and Win 7 drives, how do I make sure the system knows where to look to find the boot files and/or make sure the boot files are in the right place since everything has moved around?
Thanks!
Got an older PC dual-booting Win7 and Win8. It has a series of old, smaller HDDs, several of which are beginning to fail. First is the Win 8 drive, then a drive with two partitions, one of which is the Win 7 drive. Then another 3 drives with data, files etc. Total of 9 partitions/ drive letters over 5 drives. All of the drives are small (200GB or 300GB). They are older SATA drives except the Win 8 drive, which is IDE/ATA. I used it as the Win 8 drive because no matter how I configured the BIOS setup, the system looked there for the boot files. If the boot files weren't there, the system wouldn't boot. Not sure "boot files" is the right term, but I'm referring to the BCD and all else needed to avoid the 0xc000000f error on startup.
I just broke down and bought a 4TB drive and a 750GB drive (both SATA). I would like to move the two OSes to two partitions on the 750GB drive and put all the data and files on the 4TB.
So, I format the 750GB with two primary partitions, then one primary on the 4TB. But, after I format and partition the drives, what do I do? If I clone the Win 8 and Win 7 drives, how do I make sure the system knows where to look to find the boot files and/or make sure the boot files are in the right place since everything has moved around?
Thanks!