Ok, a few days ago I upgraded to Win10 because fuckit the free offer will out soon, and my old OS drive was suffering catastrophic mechanical failure - so I had to reinstall my OS anyway
now, I downloaded and made myself a win10 installation CD since I wouldn't be able to do a straight upgrade, plus clean installs are cleaner
...but somehow I fucked up.
My OS is installed on a drive with my C particion
but for some fucking reason one of my data storage particions have been set as Active and System! And If I 'inactive' that particion via DOS then I get "windows cannot restart because your boot data is fucked"
I know I'll have to reinstall win10 because of this - but I also want to reformat that fucking wrong system drive, but I cannot get the damn computer to reformat it, because it thinks the OS is on there!!!
What the fuck do i do?
>>149153
>but for some fucking reason one of my data storage particions have been set as Active and System!
And this is a problem why?
Windows has never needed the bootloader to be on the same drive as the OS.
Even 9x and 3.11 supported booting the OS from a different partition.
>>149157
because I need to reformat that drive - I think it has some bad sectors and I need to purge it in prep for disposal
>>149195
to put in other words: I need to remove all my porn from it before I trash a defective drive that I didn't know my computer had picked for system drive...
Foreword: Windows uses weird and stupid terminology when describing partitions.
Boot: Partition Windows is installed on. Not needed to run bootloader. Hibernation file must be here.
System: Partition bootmgr is installed on. Needed to run bootloader.
I'm not going to use this terminology, because it is retarded. When I say "boot partition", I mean the partition "\bootmgr" and "\boot" are installed on, which is what it means on EVERY OTHER OS IN THE UNIVERSE.
>>149195
- Boot off Windows 10 USB key
- press shift-f10 to bring up a command prompt
- copy \bootmgr and \boot to your new boot partition*
- PULL OLD DRIVE
- Boot off Windows 10 USB key
- press shift-f10 to bring up a command prompt
- use diskpart.exe to mark your new boot partition as active, system
- bootrec.exe /fixmbr
- bootrec.exe /fixboot
If it doesn't boot (it should), bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd
So long as your BIOS is booting the new drive first, you don't need to worry about the old drive still having an MBR, VBR, active partition and bootloader.
* if you clean-install Windows 7 or later, this is a ~2GB partition with no drive letter. If you don't create this partition, you can't use BitLocker, but you can still boot by sticking the bootloader on your Windows partition.
