Cloning to SSD then swapping drive letters

SamHobbs · 23 Feb 2016

NavyLCDR said:

However, Microsoft requires the manufacturer to both provide secure boot and have it enabled by default in order to obtain Windows 8 or Windows 10 certification and carry the Windows logo....

that was the basis for my comment. Although, Microsoft has not yet required manufacturers to remove the ability for the user to turn off secure booting on PCs - only on Windows mobile devices.

I think we are far off-topic here so I won't continue on that.

Night Hawk · 23 Feb 2016

SamHobbs said:

McAfee came with the system. I already have a license for ESET that I will use with it. I previously used McAfee for a year and I did not like it but it was not bad.

A much bigger potential problem is UEFI. It is much more sophisticated and complicated than the old BIOSs. It tries to protect us but it can also get in the way. Drives might not be bootable with UEFI. There is a safe mode (I forget what it is called) that must be disabled permanently if we install a foreign operating system.

When I ran McAFail as I nicknamed it that had been on an old 98SE build many many moons ago!

I didn't especially care for it then either. Then I went with Symantec System Works and talk about complicated?! At the time that took two cds to get it on back then having a Disk 1 and Disk 2 seen at times and sometimes you saw 3 or 4 cds until softwares later came out on dvd-rs! The early optical were mostly cd and cd writers with some being able to play only dvds if they were combo drives. The first dvd burners were like 1x/2x sloowwwwwww..... burningggg!

Afterward McAFail picked up it's own bad rep from all the review pointing at the flaws with that while bolstering the other softwares.

NavyLCDR said:

From operating systems from companies other than Microsoft....

I don't think it is as much about protecting us as it about serving Microsoft.

You should have seen it with 8 at first with the new "Secure Boot" option! The early information at the time was it would make dual booting even with a previous version like Vista or 7 next to impossible. The 7/8 CP dual when that preview was first out ended trashing both hard drives with disk errors simply having added a boot entry for8 into 7. The first restoration with the Disk Check tool got 7 going again while I decided to hit the PC Refresh option on the 8 CP there which then saw 7 added into the 8 boot. Trashed again! Finally I said No Way! Good bye 8!

pipme · 21 Apr 2016

I disconnect my system SSD which has Win10 Pro installed and working good. Then connect to the same cables a different SSD with Win8.1 Pro installed, upon rebooting the mc reports 'No operating system found' or words to that effect.
Shut down mc, reboot whilst (in my case

) tapping 'F11', up pops my 'boot menu' A-ha, the fresh SSD is not 1st choice boot device ! Make it so, and up she rises no problem.
Both SSDs are same overall size circa 250 GB, one is a Samsung the other is a Sandisk.

Upshot? If using a fresh boot disk be it a clone or whatever, if it doesn't boot do check the boot priority before ringing Bill Gates.

On the other hand ...

-0-

maarkr · 21 Jul 2016

I know this is an old thread, but it anyone searches for 'swapping drive letters', then this may help them.

Space on my mSATA drive was running low, so I cloned it to a larger SATA drive using Macrium. (Be sure to watch the video on doing it because the instructions aren't clear... it will save you a couple of hours) I thought I changed the boot drive in the BIOS to the new drive, but when I booted, the old C drive was still listed as the boot drive. After some hair pulling and not being able to change drive letters, I found this post that said that Win 10 will assign the boot drive as the C drive. AHA! I rebooted and selected the boot drive option on startup in the BIOS, selecting the new drive and VOILA, the cloned drive is now the C drive and the old C was moved to the end of the pack. Yanking the old C drive is not simple on some mSATA motherboard drives, so I wanted to leave it there.

DrJohnV · 04 Jan 2021

Just a note to help selfish me in the future......I sure do appreciate the help from Nighthawk, but as I was reading this post from long, long ago, I was trying to find the subject and the predicate in this first reply.

Hello SamHobbs Welcome to the Ten Forums!

First of all when booted from one OS drive that is the present "C" drive with any other being seen as D. E. F. G, H, etc. depending on how many you have either as far as mutiple primaries on just a pair of drives or when having two or more physical drives to work with. You can change the D if not already used by the optical drive to any other drive letter not already in use.

Once you boot into the second drive's OS the "C" then becomes the D, E, F, G, H, or other next available drive letter in the same fashion. The C is reserved strictly for the drive you are booting from at the present moment. In years past someone might made a registry edit like with XP to see a second OS drive get the "D" drive letter in order to push the optical drive's letter over to another. Or some mishap while Windows was being installed would see that happen requiring a registy edit afterwards to get things sorted out.

WCBaller1962 · 04 Jan 2021

Got a question..I sort of did the same thing but I changed the drive to F through what was given, shrink, but when the next pop-up came on listed the option to delete what was the previous drive, "which cannot be un-done", click again ..thinking the drive was shrink formatted to what was from 120gb to now, after shrink 750mb. Deciding to reboot the computer after that, what came up was a surprise. Unable to find boot file. So it seems in clicking yes to deleting the file after successful partition, it erased my drive and now DIMM 2 slot is empty with 8k+GB in DIMM 4 and 4GB in DIMM1 being the new set up. Tried everything to regain bootability with computer after this..still waiting on CD-bootable to arrive in the mail. What happened here is not following instructions as described and set myself into a rail of no returns...any help would be appreciated as I only had it for 4 days before the 120 GB warned me of insufficient space and needing to format/backup my computer...which led to here..thank you!

Cloning to SSD then swapping drive letters

Formatting C drive to simple NTFS.