Win 8.1 clone upgrade and dual boot....oh my...

Hello all

I have a sort of quick question regarding upgrading to 10.
I think I know how to do this but I wanted to double check my thoughts before I start things.

What I currently have is a 500gb ssd running dual boot 8.1 and a clean install of 10. I wasn't really sure I wanted to move to 10 so I went this route as it seemed the easiest way to play around with 10 and not loose my 8.1.

What I would now like to do is move the win 10 install to its own drive and continue the dual boot setup. I have done dual boot with separate drives in the past but I have never tried going from one drive to two.

My current thoughts are 1) to clone the 10 install to a new drive, nice fresh start, or 2) clone 8 to the new drive then do the "upgrade" route on that. Less reinstall but not so fresh.:)

I am kinda leaning towards option 2 at the moment being that I am having a bugger of time trying to get a lot of my programs to actually install right now on 10, something about UAC and things being blocked, and again, just the thought of having to actually reinstall everything that I have to start with....starting from scratch as it were. I have a lot of stuff to reinstall.

My main concern with things ether way and kind of the main question really, is how to deal with the boot loader going from one drive to two. As I mentioned, I have done two drives before, just never tried going from one to two before.

Also would their be any potential issues or concerns with the clone and upgrade that I'm maybe not considering?

Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Rick

Simple answer: Copy just the OS partition that you want to clone to the second hard drive/SSD. I like either MiniTool Partition Wizard or Macrium Reflect Free for that. Boot into your existing Windows 10. The newly copied OS partition should get a drive letter in Windows 10. Let's say it gets G:\ for it's drive letter. Right click on start icon. Select Command Prompt (Admin). In the admin Command Prompt run:

BCDBOOT G:\Windows /d /addlast

The path in red will be to the Windows folder of the new Windows OS partition. Reboot and you will find the option to boot into the newly created OS partition added to the boot menu.

Keep in mind, though, that each partition containing a Windows installation requires it's own separate license in order to comply with the EULA (End Users License Agreement). If you upgrade a Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, you still have only 1 license for Windows, you do not get an additional license. If your current Windows 10 activation came from the upgrade of the Windows 8.1 that you have, you still have only 1 license for Windows and your current dual boot setup violates the EULA. My advice is based upon the assumption that you purchased the Windows 10 you have installed and that after you copy the Windows 8.1 to a new partition that you will delete the old partition it came from so that the number of partitions with Windows installed matches the number of licenses for Windows that you have.

Thanks
Seems easier than I was expecting to be :)

Spoke too soon I guess. 😕 Sort of.

Cloneing went smooth enough. The upgrade attempt not so much. Basically several hours of little grey boxes that said nothing more than " their was a problem"....something along those lines, no other info tho.

Oh well, I'll try again tonight. ☺

Well, After roughly 9 hours....probably more....over two nights and at least 30 tries, I seem to have a successful upgrade and working dual boot....again....

Just for the "closure" on the boot loader part which was my main concern, the BCDBOOT worked great :)

Thanks again
Rick

Glad it worked for you!