Windows 10: System partition on one drive; boot partition & Windows on another?

I have a 4 year old Dell XPS 8700 running windows 10 (2004 though I don't think that matters).

I had used MiniTool Partition Wizard to clean up some partition issues on an old laptop and ran it on this machine. I see that 3 months ago when I added an SSD drive as the primary drive for Windows and kept the old HD as a data drive, the HD is listed as the System partition though the SSD is designated as the C drive, and has both the boot partition and Windows installed on it.

My question is whether it matters at all, and if so, what's the best thing to do about it? The system is running fine so I don't want to do anything unless I need to but also don't want to set myself up for future problems.


:)

 

W7 Hard drive partition issue

to get rid of that 100 meg windows partition that setup creates for you on a new install on a blank hdd:

- press shift+f10 when on the partition management screen in setup <-- this opens a command prompt
- diskpart <-- start the windows command line partition management tool
- list disk <--- list the installed hdds in this computer for the next step
- select disk 0 <- might have to replace 0 with the number of the correct disk
- clean <-- this will erase all data on the disk you selected one step up- dont use the wrong disk!
- create partition primary <- creates a primary partition taking up all space on the drive, adjust the command if necessary
- exit, exit to exit diskpart and the command prompt
- click refresh in partition manager and select your newly created partition and install to that

 

Move Win7 64 image from a partition NTFS to a new drive

EDIT: After reading your first post again, is there any reason that you would now need GPT? Are you just trying to move the windows install to a new disk or is there a new motherboard involved?

If you are already booting to an NTFS partition, then it makes me wonder if after copying to the new drive, the partition isn't getting marked as Active.

Following the same steps I posted above for startup repair, you can get to a command prompt and use diskpart to see if this is the case.

Code: In the command prompt: diskpart list disk select disk 0 (disk number may be different if you have other disks connected.) list partition select partition 0 (partition number number may vary, but you want to see the boot partition which is the same as your windows partition according to the screenshot on the OP) detail partition (This should have Active: Yes or No. If it says no, since we have the partition selected, you can just use the following command in diskpart) active[/quote]

 

Boot windows installation within a partition?

Damnit, I knew thats what you wanted with your first post! I deleted my post because JMCSLOB confused me lol.


Hm, if you Follow this guide (Replace words "flash driive" with 160GB hard drive) How to Create a Bootable Windows 7 or Vista USB Drive for both partitions and then to do a dummy install of windows 8 on the last part of the HDD it should give you the option to boot Windows 7/8 Installer or boot into windows 8.
Edit: On step 4 you will want to make sure you size the partition correctly... or you can use the windows gui tool in control panel.


Once you get that far you can just delete windows 8 from the boot menu using MSCONFIG and delete the partition.