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    Windows cross booting problem

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by trias10, Sep 5, 2015.

  1. trias10

    trias10 Notebook Consultant

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    Hello,

    I am having a rather strange issue after cloning a drive in my laptop to a USB attached drive. I did the cloning with Acronis from a USB stick, and it appeared to work successfully. Given this is a laptop, I have not removed the source disk yet. If I go to boot up from the USB attached cloned disk, something very bizarre happens: the boot loader runs off of the hidden boot partition on the USB disk (which is good, this is as it should be), however, the actual system disk which is loaded to be the C: drive is still the old, source disk! It will be a bit easier to understand if I refer to them as devices:

    Device0 (the source disk)
    - partition0: 100MB windows hidden reserve boot partition (Active partition)
    - partition1: 256 GB System disk (C: drive, only one OS)

    Device1
    - partition0: 512GB data disk

    Device2
    - partition0: 512GB data disk

    Device3 (attached via USB, the clone of Device0)
    - partition0: 100MB windows hidden reserve boot partition (Active partition)
    - partition1: 256 GB System disk (C: drive, only one OS)


    So what is happening is that if I boot off Device3 via BIOS, once Windows boots up, the Boot partition is shown as Device3\partition0 (good!), however, the System partition, the C: drive, is actually Device0\partition1 (bad!)

    The System partition, C: drive, should be Device3\partition1

    My guess is that the bootloader on Device3\partition0 is still somehow pointing to the device id of Device0, causing that one to load.

    I could (and should) just remove Device0 from the system and see what happens, but opening this laptop up is a real chore, so I was hoping there was a software fix I could try first. I'm fairly familiar with bcdedit, but I have not found any commands which seem to redirect which device something should boot from.

    Would greatly appreciate any help someone could provide.