Lost half of dual boot

colirv · 28 Sep 2015

Having run the Insider program for several months I decided to use my Windows 7 Pro disk to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro by creating a new partition and installing and upgrading there. The PC has happily dual-booted for a month or so from Volume2 (Insider on the original System Reserved and C: partitions) and Volume3 (Windows 10 Pro on I:). I've been gradually building up Volume3 with all my programs ready to transfer permanently, but as I was running out of room I used MiniTool Partition Wizard (from Volume2) to reduce the size of Volume2 and increase the size of Volume3. I realise now that was a daft thing to do, as the PC will no longer boot from Volume3! Is there a relatively simple way of making Volume3 bootable again? If too much is involved I may decide simply to run Insider for ever.

Update - I should have added that I've tried repairing it using the Windows 10 disk with which I installed it, and it simply says that it's not repairable.

NavyLCDR · 28 Sep 2015

Make a Macrium Reflect Free bootable USB/DVD. Boot from that, and in the restore options will be a boot repair utility. You can try using that.

Macrium Reflect Free

colirv · 29 Sep 2015

Thanks for that. I already had a Macrium boot CD, so tried that. It found both operating systems, but on selecting the one I wanted to repair, the next page didn't give me a boot option. However, it reminded me that just over a week ago I'd tried out my new USB3 drive with a disk image from Macrium, so ended up restoring that. It means redoing the large amount of rearranging over the last week, but at least my dual booting is now working again.