How to change the boot drive in Windows

Martin Brinkmann
Dec 27, 2012
Tutorials, Windows tips
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3

I have two Solid State Drives and one platter-based drive connected to my PC. One of the SSDs contains the Windows 7 operating system, the other nothing of importance anymore but the System Reserved partition. Any attempt to disconnect the drive from the system resulted in boot errors due to missing boot information. Since I do not really need that second SSD anymore I decided to find a way to move the System Reserved partition from that drive to my new SSD instead so that it would boot just fine without the second drive.

After fiddling around with it for a while I stumbled upon a solution that it probably the easiest option to move the boot information of the system to the hard drive the system is installed on. Instead of creating a system reserved partition on the main hard drive and moving the data of the original system reserved partition to it, it is possible to simply move the boot loader from the system reserved partition to the drive the operating system is installed on.

Note that you should not do that if you are using Bitlocker encryption or any other software that is using the system reserved partition. As always, it is suggested to create a backup of your drive before you start. A program you can use for that purpose is DriveImage XML. It is free for personal use and can backup the full partitions. If you prefer to use a different program, check out our list of backup programs for Windows.

The one program you need to move boot information to your primary drive is EasyBCD which is available free for personal use from the developer website. Scroll down until you see the solutions, and click on Register there underneath non-commercial. You are taken to a page where a click on download downloads the file to your system. You do not need to enter your email address here prior to downloading.

Start EasyBCD after installation and perform the following operations:

  • Click on BCD Backup/Repair
  • Select Change boot drive under BCD Management Options
  • Click on Perform Action

easy bcd change boot drive

A popup window is displayed then asking you to pick the new drive letter for your system. It is usually drive c that you should pick here. You will get a success message in the end that informs you about the change.

boot partition changed

If the drive the operating system is on is the first boot disk, you do not need to change anything. If it is not the first disk, you need to change the boot order in the BIOS / UEFI.

In my case, I simply removed the second Solid State Drive from the system to use the primary one as by new boot drive.

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Comments

  1. V S Rawat said on May 28, 2021 at 2:40 pm
    Reply

    As “Venkatesh R” elaborated above, EasyBCD doesn’t change it.

    I think EasyBCD can change only on MBR disks, not GPT disks. Please find out and share correct information.

    Thanks.

    Rawat

  2. Venkatesh R said on May 9, 2021 at 7:34 am
    Reply

    I have SSD (C:) and HDD (D:). Everytime boot am getting message as “Scanning and repairing \\GUIDxxxx”. When I checked BCD, it shows as “EasyBCD Boot Device: D:\”. I tried to change C: as Boot Drive and got below error. Any help?

    —————————
    Operation Not Allowed!
    —————————
    An attempt was made to change the boot partition to a logical drive, which is not allowed. The boot partition must be a primary partition.

    Please either select a different drive or convert the selected partition to primary first, then try again.
    —————————
    OK
    —————————

  3. Meena Bassem said on December 29, 2012 at 7:07 am
    Reply

    i know that app, it really helped me several times before, is there any way to get it to work on hiren’s boot cd,(without .netframework ) any other good alternative to add to the cd.
    something other than bootice

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