SOLVED Changin System Partition

[Bishop]

Hi all,

I need a bit of help on this one. I am currently configuring a media center with 5 SATA Drives. I ran into a Bootmgr issue and had to reinstall windows 7 on one of the drives. Now I have a problem where the "System" Partition is on a different drive to the "Boot" Partition.

The boot drive with windows 7 is a mirrored drive. The drive with the System partition is just a data drive with no redundancy.


To Recap:

Mirrored Drives
Disk 0 - C:\ Boot - page file - crash dump
Disk 3 - C:\Boot - page file - crash dump

un-mirrored Data Drive
Disk 1 D:\ System, Active, Primary Partition


Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Bishop

 

[linuxdudex12]

I don't know if I understand the question fully, but do you want to change it so another Partition is "boot"? If so I found a way to do this one time because I accidentally changed the partition with the boot flag and I could no longer get into my windows 7. I booted up a Livecd of ubuntu 9.10 and used the gparted program that came with it. Note do NOT install Linux, just boot up into the try Linux feature so it will boot into RAM from the CD.

Once your on the Desktop goto the "system" menu then administration then there should be a program called gparted.
I think you right click on your partition in the main window goto manage flags then there should be an option to set the boot flag.

I may be wrong have not messed with gparted in a while, but I hope stuff works out for you.

 

[Nibiru2012]

Since you state 'mirrored drives" I am assuming that you have a RAID setup?

Since you have multiple drives. Disconnect the ones that are data drives only.

Leave the mirrored or RAID drives connected. Be sure your BIOS is configured for RAID also.

Put the appropriate chipset SATA RAID drivers on a flash or external hard drive in a folder you'll recognize.

GParted can also be downloaded as a separate CD ISO image file which you can burn to a CD-R or CD-RW. Its free and a Linux based CD bootable partition program, but it will do Windows file tables such as NTFS, FAT and FAT 32.

You can also download Partition Wizard's CD ISO image. Its free also.

Wipe your mirrored array clean and start from scratch and you should be okay. Windows 7 is finicky in the fact that more that one hard drive(s) causes it to have fits when trying to install it.

Here's a good tutorial on installing Windows 7 to a RAID: http://www.nikmakris.com/blog/post/Installing-Hardware-RAID-on-Windows-7.aspx

 

[clifford_cooley]

Hi Bishop - Welcome to w7forums

Disconnect your data drive and see if you can boot to the raid configured drives.

If not use the windows repair features on the windows install disk.

Once you get windows booting, re-connect the data drive an make sure to select the raid config as boot drives in your system bios. If the data drive is set to boot first the raid config will not even be looked at for boot files.

 

[Bishop]

Found a Solution

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your replies. In between work (It does get in the way) and other responsibilites, I have managed to find a resolve.

First off I blew away the mirrors (they were software RAIDed through Windows). I then removed every disk exept the one with the windows install on it.

This gave me an error of Bootmgr could not be found.

I then rebuilt the bootmanager with the Windows Install disk and the rebuildbcd command.

I then reattached the rest of the disks and now I seem to be in good shape.

Thanks again!

Bishop

PS I did use the Gparted ISO when I was troubleshooting. good stuff!