Moving OS's around

[Noone II]

I have an SSD and a hard drive. Windows is currently installed on the SSD and I have another OS on the hard drive. I want to partition the SSD and have both OS's on the SSD. How can I do that?

 

[ArtPog]

Here's another option to achieve your objective that you might want to consider. We'll assume that the two OSs are Win 7 & Win 8.1.

1. On the intended boot drive (SSD) that will contain both OSs create two partitions by shrinking the current single partition (we'll assume this partition contains the Win 7 OS) as suggested by anonymous1 and create the second partition in the now unallocated disk space.

2. Using a disk-cloning program clone the contents (Win 8.1 OS) from your HDD to the second partition of the SSD. Ensure that your SSD is (or will be) connected to the first SATA connector on your motherboard. I'm assuming that you will subsequently be using your HDD as a secondary drive for add'l storage in your PC.

3. In order to boot to one or the other OS it will be necessary for you to access Disk Management > Properties, right-click on the desired OS's schematic and select "Mark Partition as Active". As long as you continue to boot to that OS no further user input is necessary.

4. If you desire to boot to the Win 7 OS installation you should mark Active the System Reserved partition that's usually created when that OS is installed. If there's no such partition just mark Active the Win 7 schematic (as indicated above).

5. Admittedly this business of marking Active one or the other OSs in order to boot to the desired OS is a bit awkward but it's simple to do and not too terribly time-consuming, especially when working with an SSD. There may be some programs available that can streamline this process by permitting the user to select the OS during bootup, however, I'm loathe to use third-party programs so I'm not familiar with them in this area.

6. I use the Casper disk-cloning program and the above process is based on my experience with that program. My chief interest for using Casper is that I find the program an ideal one in maintaining a comprehensive backup program for my PCs. It's extraordinarily fast in undertaking the disk-cloning operation when used on a routine/frequent basis. I frequently clone my disks on a daily basis and more time than not it takes less than one minute to complete the cloning operation. The program is a commercial product - costs $49.99.

There are, as you probably know, quite a number of freebie disk-cloning programs available but I'm not terribly familiar with them so I can't make any personal recommendations.