Windows 10: Wish to change drive order - Drive 1 is currently D: and Drive 2 is C:

I'm currently configuring a new PC with Windows 10 Pro - it has two identical 2TB hard drives. Somehow (and don't ask me how) the drive order has become mixed up and volume C: is on drive 2 while volume D: is on drive 1. The boot drive must be drive 2 given that volume C: is on it as I type this.

I want to change things around so volume C: is on drive 1 but am not sure how to go about this. Naturally I want to have drive 1 as my main boot drive. I do have Acronis True Image installed on the PC as well as Acronis Disk Director so hopefully these will help.

Why do I want to do this? On my old PC I used Acronis True Image to clone my drives so drive 2 was a backup of drive 1. While I can of course just clone drive 2 to drive 1 on the new PC it makes sense in my head to clone 1 to 2 and I don't of course want to accidentally do it the wrong way around and erase new files with old ones.

At a guess the best way seems to be to clone disk 2 to disk 1 and then swap around the boot order in the BIOS. Does that sound right?

Thanks

:)

 

Activating a GPT Partition

On a Lenovo IdeaPad Ultra Book, I installed a used drive that was working OK and installed Windows 10. After using it for a short time, I noticed that the C: Drive, Disk 0 , and I copied the files from Drive C from the only partition on the disk to a much
larger partition on Logical Disk 1, which is currently Drive D. In order to complete a move to Drive D, in Diskpart, I typed the command "ACTIVE" without the quotes. and get a message that this can't be done with a GTP partition. My question is how to I
activate the new partition as the boot drive?

Just for clarity:

Logical Disk 0
Logical Disk 1
Logical Drive 1
Logical Drive 1
Logical Drive 1

Partition 1
Partition 1
Partition 2
Partition 3
Partition 4

C Drive /
System/ Disk D
Reserved
Primary
Primary /Disk F

moved to files, folders and storage

 

My C drive is almost full, while my D drive is empty

Thank you for your quick reply.

Again, I this is my first Windows computer, so all of this is still a learning curve.

Ive conducted some more research and apparently its possible to allocate space from the D Drive to the C Drive. Is this safe? I have no personal files on the D Drive except for the default files. If I proceed with this, will my computer be corrupted?

Thank you

 

Are these SSD Drives? SATA Drives? If they are all you need to do is Power Off your PC and swap the SATA Cables.

 

It actually depends on the UUID of the Partition and the drive, for what gets assigned the letter. Swapping them is not going to change anything, because it is in the MBR.

 

That's not true at all. @Josey Wales was correct. Swap the sata cables and change the boot order in BIOS/UEFI to boot from the new drive 0.

For example:





If I swapped my SATA cables around, my C: and E: would be physically located on Drive 1, and my D: and R: would be on Drive 0. As long as I changed the boot order in UEFI to boot from the new Drive 1, everything would operate exactly as it does now - expect the drive numbers would be swapped.

 

Thanks all - these are SATA hard drives. Some time today I'll swap the cables as suggested and change the boot order then report back here.

 

All working now, thanks all.

I should have said that I also have a SATA Blu-ray drive in the PC on SATA 3. At first I swapped the SATA 1 and SATA 2 cables for the hard drives and changed the boot order but strangely this kept C: on drive 2 and D: on drive 1. So I disconnected the Blu-ray drive and then the hard drive order was correct. Reconnected the Blu-ray drive and the hard drive order is still correct.

So all is well. *Smile

 

That would be a Bios issue, not a problem with the OS.