Migrating Multiple Disk Setup from MBR to GPT without data loss?

*** Note: I didn't realized it now says Windows Boot Manager, now I'm even more confused)

1st of all, thank you very much, guys!

Current Disk Management (Man, it looks awful at the moment)




And the weirdness in my BIOS

Disk Boot Priority: (I always had whatever OS I wanted to look for first selected according to the drive)



I disabled everything except my main drive (disk 0 with the restored partition in GPT with Win 10)



And here's the funny part....
P1: Is my Disk 1 (secondary drive, the one with only data), it wasn't connected when I clean installed Windows 10, and it was already there....
With P0: (Disk 0) selected with only that disk connected, the clean install booted up correctly.... But not when I restored the image....
So, there's definitely something wrong there...



Selecting that P1 - Windows Boot Manager, did the trick...



Feeling silly is an understatement...


The question remains, why was the Windows Boot Manager linked to a drive that wasn't even connected?
Could it be just a coding error on the BIOS?

Note: I just converted my Disk 2 to GPT, and it has a Partition of 128 MB

DISKPART> select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART> convert gpt

DiskPart successfully converted the selected disk to GPT format.

DISKPART> list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Reserved 128 MB 17 KB

___
Do you guys have that GPT reserved partition on your OS drive?

128MB MSR on secondary drives reserved is normal. You can delete it but MS recommend it is there (but are vague what it is for). You'll not see it in disk management so I'd leave it.

Where has your samples partition gone? (was drives D and S in the first picture). You've not lost it I hope.

I'm not sure about your BIOS - perhaps it holds previous boot configurations in NVRAM or something - in fact it must if the drive was not connected. There must be a way to reset it but I've no idea how.

I think the issues come from the fact that you DIDN'T unplug the Drives as lx07 said ...... ( bad boy ! :) or woman I am equal opportunity )

you DISABLED them in the BIOS instead.......but they are still there and the Bios still "sees" them .


I do not have any 128mb MSR Partitions on my secondary drives , just the win10 16mb one on the OS Drive. (default in win 8 was 128mb on OS drive) however I usually use MTPW not diskpart to do this sort of thing....which shows them as "Other"....


KB.

lx07 said:

128MB MSR on secondary drives reserved is normal. You can delete it but MS recommend it is there (but are vague what it is for). You'll not see it in disk management so I'd leave it.

Where has your samples partition gone? (was drives D and S in the first picture). You've not lost it I hope.

I'm not sure about your BIOS - perhaps it holds previous boot configurations in NVRAM or something - in fact it must if the drive was not connected. There must be a way to reset it but I've no idea how.

Yes, I lost it during the Windows Restore, it re-created several temporary partitions I had and formated everything, no biggie, it's all in an external hard drive...

And about that NVRAM / Disk , that disk never had an OS or anything, otherwise, that could be the case... But I never saw anything besides the actual P0: Disk part#, P1: Disk part#, P2: Disk part#, before all of this process...

P0 P1 P2 etc is all part of the new UEFI BIOS Stuff , if CSM is on too, you will see them all shown Twice , once for UEFI Boot , Once for Legacy Boot. Same for USB Drives , DVD etc. if they are UEFI Boot Compatible.


KB.

Disk 0 looks perfectly fine partition wise. 330GB might be a bit large for C drive - there is nothing wrong with that of course - but unless you have really huge programs you could shrink it to 100GB (for example) and then use the rest for the next partition - it is easier to do this before formatting the unallocated space after C..

There is one more thing you do need to do and that is to check Windows knows where the recovery partition is. From elevated command prompt check reagentc /info If it says disabled (which it probably will) you'll need to mount partition 1 (on disk 0) and register it.

in diskpart:

Select disk 0
select partition 1
assign letter = T

In command prompt: Reagentc /setreimage /path T:\Recovery\WindowsRE /target C:\Windows

In diskpart: remove

Then check reagentc /info again.

This is from here Deploy Windows RE but you don't need to do most of it as the clean install of Windows 10 will have put the WinRE in the (correctly formatted) recovery partition anyway.

Kbird said:

I think the issues come from the fact that you DIDN'T unplug the Drives as lx07 said ...... ( bad boy ! :) or woman I am equal opportunity )

you DISABLED them in the BIOS instead.......but they are still there and the Bios still "sees" them .

Bad boy lol

I disabled them now just in case, but after everything was working

Since I don't have any more OS installed it won't do anything, just overkill....

I have a feeling that if I had changed that to Windows Boot Manager yesterday, it would have worked, even if I did everything with every disk connected....

But today I followed lx07's instructions bordering on OCD.

About the MSR partitions, when I clean installed Win 10, I deleted the partition that was created when I converted the disk to GPT (128 MB) as the Windows Setup was bugging me with the "I don't like the partition order" message.... Then it created the 4 partitions and the MSR is not 16 MB...

I read that it is just reserved space just in case they need it for something OS related at some point, no one is going to die because of 16-128 MB nowadays...

Kbird said:

P0 P1 P2 etc is all part of the new UEFI BIOS Stuff , if CSM is on too, you will see them all shown Twice , once for UEFI Boot , Once for Legacy Boot. Same for USB Drives , DVD etc. if they are UEFI Boot Compatible.

KB.

Thanks!

I noticed that for the CD/DVD drive only.... It's the only one that actually says UEFI in one, and nothing in the other

Kbird said:

P0 P1 P2 etc is all part of the new UEFI BIOS Stuff , if CSM is on too, you will see them all shown Twice , once for UEFI Boot , Once for Legacy Boot. Same for USB Drives , DVD etc. if they are UEFI Boot Compatible.

ah, thanks. I know nothing about that as I have a Mac so I don't have a BIOS at all. Well obviously I do have something but it has exactly zero configurable parameters and just calls whatever is in the EFI partition.