I installed windows to my ssd but it boots from my hdd?

[thesaltydalty]

When I installed windows I had both my ssd and my hard drive plugged in, but when it wanted me to select a drive to boot to I highlighted the ssd and clicked next. It installed windows on it and all is good. But then when I went to change some stuff in the bios, I noticed it had my 1tb hard drive as the boot device. Windows is installed to the sdd so I was really confused by this. I tried making the ssd the first boot device but it didn't work, so I just changed it back to my hard drive for now, but I would like to know what's going on. Looking in the windows partition manager right now it does say my ssd is the boot drive. But my hdd does have a system reserved partition on it that's listed as system and active, my ssd is listed as boot and crash dump. Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. I thought the system reserved partition was just something windows needed, but I think it may be the cause of this. If that partition is the cause is there any way to move it without reinstalling windows?

 

[sminlal]

When you install Windows it creates a 100MB recovery partition that it boots from. It places this partition on different drive than the OS drive if it can find one. The idea is that if your OS is unbootable for some reason you can still boot from the recovery partition and use it to try to fix the problem.

But you can do the same thing by booting from the Windows DVD, and most people prefer that the OS drive be their boot drive. So I usually recommend disconnecting everything except the OS drive when you do the install, and then connect the other drives once the installation is finished.

Unfortunately I don't know of a way to fix it other than to reinstall windows with the hard drive disconnected.

 

[mtcolley89]

Not that I know of. Only idea is to use a partitioning program to create a new oartition on ur ssd and copy the windows info on ur hdd to it and see if it works, but i doubt it Maybe somebody else does. If you do reinstall. Unplug ur hdd. While you install windows to prevent this from happening again.

 

[thesaltydalty]

When you install Windows it creates a 100MB recovery partition that it boots from. It places this partition on different drive than the OS drive if it can find one. The idea is that if your OS is unbootable for some reason you can still boot from the recovery partition and use it to try to fix the problem.

But you can do the same thing by booting from the Windows DVD, and most people prefer that the OS drive be their boot drive. So I usually recommend disconnecting everything except the OS drive when you do the install, and then connect the other drives once the installation is finished.

Unfortunately I don't know of a way to fix it other than to reinstall windows with the hard drive disconnected.

I'm fine with that as long as I'm not losing the speed I would get if it were booting fully from my ssd.

 

[sminlal]

I'm fine with that as long as I'm not losing the speed I would get if it were booting fully from my ssd.

You probably won't see a lot of boot speed difference because the loader that gets read from the boot partition is pretty small.

 

[thesaltydalty]

Best answer selected by thesaltydalty.

 

[mistert]

I can tell you how I would fix this problem but it means starting over. Since your boot drive is currently your HDD, use partition wizard (free) or equivalent and remove (merge if the software you use allows) any 100mb partition from your ssd. No need to re-format. Make a CD repair disk of the partition software. You do not need the 100mb partition that windows creates on new installs. Any windows repair disk functions can be run from the install disk if needed later. Then remove any 100mb partition from the HDD. When you do this the computer will no longer boot. Start the windows install process again from the install disk picking the ssd as the install drive. Make sure the SSD is the first to boot in the bios.
You will notice some difference by using the SSD as a boot drive. Boot up times are reduced and overall windows files use is faster although you won't notice it much.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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