Gfrktyl

I have a question about active partitions (Windows 10). When I installed Windows on SSD#1, Windows decided to place the active partition on SSD#2 (which I use for nothing at the moment; I know this because I can see it in disk manager and also through diskpart).

What I want to do is take SSD#2 and put it in an HTPC I'm building. I took out SSD#2 yesterday but my the computer said:

Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key.

I plugged it back in and the computer booted up normally.

My question is, how do I move the active partition to my actual boot drive (SSD#1)? If I go to disk management I can make a small partition on SSD#1 and set it as active as opposed to SSD#2, but

a. will that also add the necessary boot files to the new partition? and

b. would that mess something up with Windows booting?

What you need is partition management and cloning software. Personally I use Paragon Hard Disk Manager (which would make much of what I'm about to say much easier... but it's not cheap). You can find free solutions such as GPartEd and clonezilla.

In your case you appear to already have enough free space available on Disk 0, so you only need clonezilla. Using that you can make a copy of the first partition from Disk 1 to the unallocated space on Disk 0. Understand that the names and even the order the drives are listed under clonezilla will be different. But you should be able to identify which is which by their dramatically different total capacities.

However, that still will not let you boot when you remove Disk 1. This is because there is a special bit of code found outside the partition in a place called the "boot sector". This bit of code is necessary for your BIOS to find the windows 10 boot loader and begin booting windows.

But before you solve that problem there is yet another: The active partition only indicates the boot partition for that drive. Each drive can have it's own Active partition. The point is that the "Active" partition does not, tell the BIOS which drive to boot.

To tell your BIOS which drive to boot you will need to go into your BIOS and check your boot settings, making sure your system drive is the first in the boot order. In fact, the reason windows may have installed it's boot files to the second drive is that it may have detected that this is your currently configured boot drive.

Once the BIOS is booting the correct drive you can solve the missing boot sector code by booting from your Windows 10 DVD and entering the recovery environment. Then run the "Startup Repair" option. This should find the missing boot sector code and create it again on your currently configured boot drive.

One last detail. Understand that your system appears to be using the older BIOS boot method. However, EFI is the default with fresh installations of Windows 10. As such most of the information out there about solving this problem will be focused on EFI and will not be relevant to you. Keep this in mind.