Moving the System Partition

[Bearcat]

Hi all,

When I recently installed Windows 7 on my new build, I made the mistake of having my storage HDD hooked up and Windows created the System Partition on it, instead of the C drive. The System Partition contains the boot info, so you need it to load Windows. I didn't like having the system partition on the storage drive, so after doing a little research, I discovered there is a method to move to system partition to the C drive and it worked for me.

1) You need to have your Windows DVD, or create a system repair disk, which you can do in the control panel window under "backup or restore your files".
2) Then you need to create a new 100 Mb partition on your C drive. I created one at the back of the drive and formatted it NTFS. I labeled it "System Folder" but didn't assign it a drive letter.
3) Once the new partition is created, you need to right click on it and then click on "mark the partition as active".
4) When that is done, shut down the computer and remove the cable from the storage HDD.
5) Then reboot the computer using either the Windows 7 DVD, or the system repair disk in the DVD drive.
6) Once the program has loaded, choose the "Use recovery tools that can help fix problems starting Windows" option and click "next". On the menu that opens click on "Startup Repair" and windows will then save the boot info in the system partition you have created.
7) Restart your computer and Windows should load normally. I checked to make sure it did, before re-connecting the storage HDD.
8) Once the storage HDD is back online, you can then delete the system partition on that drive and resize the partition to use that space.

[Murphy]

Hi,
Good work
Best regards !

[Bearcat]

Thanks Murphy and Ted! I don't know if this will be useful to many people, but I thought it was worth sharing anyway.

[curlysue]

hey, that is usefull! how about a dual-boot arrangement (XP/W7) where the System Reserved was placed in a folder named "Boot" in the Windows XP partition?

i ask because i once had a dual-boot like that and when i made a W7 image backup using DiscWizard there was no System Reserved included. when i used the image backup, W7 would not boot.

how can i get back the System Reserved to the partition for W7? (i mean the "Boot" folder that appeared in XP)..

now i am BIOS booting (bought separate drives for W7 and XP) so that problem will not surface with me.

but a friend had to:

a. format again the whole 320gb drive to W7, then,
b. re-sized it, created a new partition and installed XP on the new partition.

any ideas here...?

thanks

[JayCub]

Thanks for the information Bear and your not alone with that happening and im sure it will happen many times again, yep it happened to me too but it's now on the C drive ...

[Bearcat]

@ curlysue The method I used would only work for Windows 7. I'm not sure how to go about restoring a dual boot, other than re-installing Windows 7 on the HDD that currently has XP on it, but maybe someone else would be good enough to supply an answer. I once had a triple boot on my old PC with XP, 7 and Linux Ubuntu. GRUB bootloader will set up a chainloader, which allows you to choose which OS you want to boot, when you first start up your computer.

[princeaniket]

wow... gud work Bear.. if any of my friends will make the system partition by mistake like yours.. i will refer him this tutorial..
nice job....

[paf]

Excellent job, Bearcat . Very helpful, thanks a lot.

[curlysue]

@ Bearcat,

thanks for the reply dear. that question always sticks to my mind whenever i format a dual-boot partition of XP/W7 on a single HDD. i searched for a time for that particular answer on other forums but found noting. i did found a similar event but it was on a dual BIOS boot(separate HDD's), the recommendation was to use EasyBCD(the OP did not try it though --ended up reformating the XP drive anew).

i'd like to try that one day but i ran out of HDD's for that experiment ha ha lol

but let's it remain here...someone might have the answer in support/addition to the scenario we have all encountered.

very nice tutorial by the way

[jj1two3]

Job well done Bearcat, I am sure this will help a lot of people that have this problem.