Hard Drive Help

**Spyder228** · 10-22-2009 10:30 AM

Ok so last night I installed my secondary drive hoping to boost performance. I wanted to copy my data partition over to it and reassign the drive letter. Now Windows will not boot.

This was the setup before the copy:
C: Main Windows
D: Main Storage
E: Main Linux
F: Linux Swap

Blah: Unallocated secondary disc

Needless to say, all lettered drives where on the same drive.

This was what I told Acronis to do:

Copy partition D: to unallocated space on second drive and expand partition from 600 -> 700 Gb naming new partition H:. Rename partition D: to G:, then rename H: to D: effectively copying my storage partition to the new drive and invalidating the data on the main drive but retaining it in case of disc failure.

I tried to boot and got MBR failure. Booted recovery console and did a fixmbr. Now I get nothing. Just a blinking cursor after post. WTH!?

Now I'm pretty sure that if I did a repair install of Windows on C: it'll probably fix it but I don't want to do that with Win7 in the mail. Just seems like a waste.

Anyone have any idea how I can get this setup to boot the way I need it?

EDIT: Scratch all that. I'll have Win7 in my mailbox when I get home. I'll just boot a live disc and pull off the files I want and wipe it and install Win7.

**snooggums** · 10-22-2009 01:27 PM

Making sure I have the right order of steps you took:

1)Copy partition D: to unallocated space on second drive

Is that the drive H?

2) and expand partition from 600 -> 700 Gb naming new partition H:.

Did you expand the partition on the first disk, and if so did you bump into your windows partition?

3) Rename partition D: to G:, then rename H: to D: effectively copying my storage partition to the new drive and invalidating the data on the main drive but retaining it in case of disc failure.

So disk one now has:
C: Main Windows
D: Main Storage (now G: ) expanded another 100 GB?
E: Main Linux
F: Linux Swap
Disk two:
H: (now D: )

Now I'm pretty sure that if I did a repair install of Windows on C: it'll probably fix it but I don't want to do that with Win7 in the mail. Just seems like a waste.

I think you are correct to assume that installing a fresh copy of 7 and then retrieving your files from your old drive is the best option at this point.

**Spyder228** · 10-22-2009 03:16 PM

The unallocated space on the second drive was first formatted as drive H:. The partition should have been expanded AFTER copying but before changing the drive letter. Original partition D: on the first drive should not have been alter except for changing it's drive letter.

**snooggums** · 10-22-2009 03:29 PM

Originally Posted by Spyder228

The unallocated space on the second drive was first formatted as drive H:. The partition should have been expanded AFTER copying but before changing the drive letter. Original partition D: on the first drive should not have been alter except for changing it's drive letter.

I think you are making your partition scheme unnecessarily complex as the drive letter doesn't matter except for your Windows and Program files which it looks like should all be on C:

If you didn't alter C: I don't know why you would have run into the MBR problem unless it was in the unallocated space that you expanded the partition into.

I'm so confused, I really don't have any further input.

**Spyder228** · 10-22-2009 03:43 PM

Basically I wanted to move my D: partition (which housed all program files) to the separate drive but couldn't accomplish that without changing drive letters. It would have done me no good to just clone the D: to the new drive as Windows would still look for things on the D: partition on the same drive as windows.

I have no idea what went wrong but Win7 should solve my woes. Trading a night of ArmA for installing an OS and all my games again.

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