How can I move the boot sector to another drive?

When I installed Windows 7 on my new SSD it seems I messed some parts up during the partition selection, and now I have my system partition with the boot sector on another harddrive, and the boot partition containing Windows on my SSD.

How can I move the boot sector from my hard drive to my SSD, so that the system and boot partition are both the SSD and I don't need the hard drive to boot anymore?

I'm a bit lost on how to do this, as I don't have any idea how I split them in the first place. When I had to repair the boot sector using BootRec.exe I could only put it back on the hard drive, I saw no option to create one somewhere else.

I also want to keep all content on my SSD, so reinstalling Windows is not an option.

Here's a screenshot of my current disk layout (in german, but most terms should be easily recognizable):

enter image description here

Mad Scientist

Posted 2013-01-30T17:25:06.530

Reputation: 1 055

1Did you try disconnecting the HDD before running bootrec? – Karan – 2013-01-30T18:08:54.717

Answers

I finally used Easy BCD, which is free for personal use. The bcdboot method didn't work for some reason for me, the command exited sucessfully and copied files, but I still couldn't boot from c:.

Easy BCD has a "Change boot drive" option under BCD Backup/Repair, which worked in my case.

Mad Scientist

Posted 2013-01-30T17:25:06.530

Reputation: 1 055

1Didn't work for me. Easy BCD told me C: is not a primary partition and refused to do anything (it is a primary partition). – Petr Peller – 2017-03-23T20:45:55.617

I believe the command you need is:

bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

It seems you describe the exact same issue that Scott Hanselman does in this blog post

Justin Dearing

Posted 2013-01-30T17:25:06.530

Reputation: 2 704

1This worked for me as well. In my case, as also pointed out in the comments of the blog posts, I had to mark the partition as active as well. – Wouter – 2015-11-15T18:28:49.267

Worked like a charm - you have to execute it as admin and you should keep in mind to use the correct drive letters if the drive you want to boot from is not on c:\\ – Marwie – 2016-09-30T14:58:38.463

(Windows 10) Thank you, this worked perfectly. I had an old installation on an unused but connected drive that audibly started failing and unplugging it would prevent my useful installation from booting. Running this command in a "run as administrator" cmd window solved the issue. Beautiful! – qubodup – 2017-09-01T11:48:07.233