Windows 10 Pro Needed

I had to reinstall windows 10 a while back and made a rookie move and forgot to unplug my secondary drive. Windows installed the System Reserved partition on the secondary drive. I cant boot into widows without my secondary drive connected.

Does anyone know the safest and easiest way to move my system reserved partition to my main drive, I want to upgrade to windows 11 and need to convert my drive from Legacy to UEFI, another rookie mistake not installing in UEFI mode. Thanks

If you are not on UEFI, and booting in legacy BIOS mode from an MBR drive, then the solution is to open a command prompt with administrative privileges and run:

Code:

diskpart
select volume c
active
exit
bcdboot C:\Windows /s C: /f BIOS
exit

You can now boot the computer in legacy BIOS mode from the drive containing C: partition.

Hi Navy,

Good to see a fellow veteran! So, will this create a new system reserve partition ? Also, can I convert the drive to UEFI with mbr2gpt after this suggestion? Thanks

abn505 said:

Hi Navy,

Good to see a fellow veteran! So, will this create a new system reserve partition ? Also, can I convert the drive to UEFI with mbr2gpt after this suggestion? Thanks

It will not create a system reserved partition. It will make your C: drive the system partition. If your drive meets all the requirements for mbr2gpt, then it should convert. mbr2gpt will create an EFI system partition.

The system partition requirement for mbr2gpt is:
"One of the partitions is set as active and is the system partition"

Your C: drive will be set as active and will be come the system partition once you boot from it.

[QUOTE=NavyLCDR;2304914]It will not create a system reserved partition. It will make your C: drive the system partition. If your drive meets all the requirements for mbr2gpt, then it should convert. mbr2gpt will create an EFI system partition.

I haven't been at my machine to try it yet, and have one more question. I am assuming the system reserved partitian on my secondary drive that has the BCD and other boot files that are used to boot into Windows are also in C drive so it will boot after I make it active. I plan on reforming the secondary drive so it doesn't try to boot from it. Thanks

All,

Thank You both for your help, I was able to boot into windows and convert to UEFI BIOS. I was not able to enable my WinRE environment using command prompt after the conversion using mbr2gpt though. Any suggestion? Do I need it , or should I just upgrade to windows 11? Thanks

Windows RE will come back when you upgrade to Windows 11. You don't need it anyway, everything in Windows RE is available by booting from a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive.

NavyLCDR said:

Windows RE will come back when you upgrade to Windows 11. You don't need it anyway, everything in Windows RE is available by booting from a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive.

Thank You!!!