Windows 10: Win10 installed on C: but boot partition on E:

I purchased a new hard drive last Christmas when I was running out of storage space. I already had 2 drives at the time, and I decided to install a new copy of Win10 on the new drive, making the 2 old drives D: and E: where D: was the previous Win10 drive i.e. boot drive. Everything was fine.


Recently, my E: drive started to act up bad sectors so I purchased another new drive. I thought I would simply swap the E: drive with the new drive but my PC no longer boot up from C: ...... it boots up from D: instead, even when I selected C: to boot from the BIOS menu. I then disconnected D: and tried to re-boot, but the PC failed to boot goes into BIOS menu.


I then removed the new drive and put back E: drive, well, the PC boots with C: just the way the worked before. After posting my scenario in a public forum and shared my Disk Management screen, I was explained that despite Win10 was installed on C:, there was a partition created in E: for the boot-up process, therefore the reason E: must be in the PC in order to boot with the Win10 on C:. I don't recall being asked any question or prompted with information about E: being used to boot when I installed Win10 on the C: drive. Regardless, I hope someone can help me with the below questions:


1 Would it be possible to move/transfer the "boot partition" from E: to C: so that I can boot from C: without having to depend on E: being present or any way to repair Win10 to achieve the same result: boot from C: without E: being present?

2 If I was to install a brand new copy of Win10 in future, how could I avoid the same problem again i.e. Win10 on one drive but boot partition on another drive?

:)

 

Vista Beta 2 Installed

Well first I defragged the drive, then go into partition magic and select "create a new partition" and make sure it is "after c:"

Then click the rest of the way through the menus, and in the lower left there is a list of pending activites and click "apply" and you will have to restart and before windows boots partition magic does its thing.

 

Vista Beta 2 Installed

Partition Magic is giving me trouble though. I'm just installing Vista and tell it not to overwrite Drive C so that I can still dual boot XP and Vista.

wazzledoozle, can you tell me step by step how to make a partition in Partition Magic?

 

booting xp when vista was installed 1st

any1 know if there is a command when booting to select the partition xp was installed on, vista was installed first but on the primary partition c:/ xp is on e:/