Making space for a boot partition after installing W7 on 2nd drive

[speedyg869]

I have two SSDs installed. The second one is replacing the first due to reoccurring bad sectors. The Boot partition is on the first drive. I reinstalled Windows 7 on the second SSD and then I realized that I did not create a 100MB partition at the beginning of the drive. To correct this, I'm planing to boot from the first SSD and move the partition on the second SSD to make room for a 100MB partition for the Bootmgr. After that I plan to use EasyBCD to copy the Bootmgr to the second SSD as dicribed in "Changing the Boot Partition" in the Wiki.
My question is, After I move the partition on the second SSD, will the pointer in the MBR on the first SSD get updated to reflect that change so I can boot either OS from the first SSD? If not, is there a way to correct that issue using EasyBCD?

View Settings listing: where Windows 7 CCF is the first SSD (Drive 0) and Windows 7 CCG is the second SSD (Drive 1).
There are a total of 2 entries listed in the bootloader.

Default: Windows 7 CCG
Timeout: 30 seconds
EasyBCD Boot Device: C:\

Entry #1
Name: Windows 7 CCF
BCD ID: {0a22f9e6-6d0c-11e8-8eec-f382ba5702f1}
Drive: N:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

Entry #2
Name: Windows 7 CCG
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

Thanks in advance.

 

[Terry60]

You don't need to move anything on an SSD. Unlike HDD, there's no speed advantage in being in a particular location.
If there's no space unallocated on the new SSD, just use "shrink volume" in Disk Management to create the space you need for a boot partition after the OS.
You don't actually need a boot partition anyway. You can just use EasyBCD "change boot drive" and point it at the OS partition (unless you are planning to encrypt your OS in which case the boot files must be separate to remain unencrypted. That's the only reason W7 defaulted to creating a boot partition whereas Vista did not)

In answer to your actual question. If you move the location of the start of the OS partition, the previously created boot entry in the BCD will fail.
All you need do though, is delete the entry and add it again.

 

[speedyg869]

Thank you for your response Terry!
Sorry, I meant shrink the volume, which would involve moving 100MB of data.

I don't know how I missed this, but W7 automatically left 100MB of unallocated space when I installed it on the second SSD. I realized it this morning when I was getting ready to shrink the volume.

I was unaware that the partition is only used when encrypting the disk and otherwise never being used.
I will leave a donation since your software is very useful.

 

[Terry60]

It is used by default, but it isn't necessary to have it separate except for the reason mentioned.

 

[speedyg869]

I used EasyBCD to copy the Bootmgr from Disk 2 to Disk 1 as described in "Changing the Boot Partition" in the Wiki. Ignore Disk 0 and Disk 3. Before I started, Disk Management looked like the image below, except Disk 1 has another 35MB partition between C: and D: for the Page file.


In order to copy the boot files to the 100MB unallocated partition on Disk 1, I needed to assign a drive letter to it (U) and format it NTFS. Then using EasyBCD, I selected "Change boot drive" and "Perform Action". The operation completed successfully.
But the result is not what I expected. The boot files where copied to U: as seen below:


But D: was made the active partition. See below:

Prior to the change, C: was the active partition.

Did I follow the procedure correctly or should I have specified C: as the target of the operation?
Thanks in advance.

 

[speedyg869]

Nevermind. Disregard the previous post.
I just made the System partition on Disk 1 the active partition and then I rebooted and set the BIOS to point to Disk 1 and it booted fine.
Thanks for this great utility!