swap mbr/gpt drive

[vinegarjoe]

Hi All,

I have windows 10 installed on a 1tb Samsung SSD, and several other HDs. I just purchased a new 4tb WD RE drive to replace my old 1TB WD black from 2009 which has been my general storage disk since then. For some odd reason when I installed windows 10 onto the ssd, it put the MBR (or whatever the win10 equivalent is) on the old spindle drive. I want to retire that drive since it is so old, but am not sure how to get the MBR (or win10 equivalent) transferred to my newer SSD.

Rest of my specs:
i5 3570K
gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H mobo
Gigabyte GV-N66TWF2-2GD GTX 660 Ti 2GB graphics card
2x8GB G.Skill Ares DDR3 1866 Ram
1TB Samsung 850 EVO system drive
4TB WD RE storage
256GB OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS (Windows 7 backup)
1TB WD Black HD (from 2009) to be retired.

 

[DR_Luke]

My suggestion is to backup everything from both drives, disconnect all drives but the SSD, re-install Windows 10, connect the new 4TB drive, copy backed up data to the 4TB drive and move on. (more or less)

 

[vinegarjoe]

i would really like to avoid having to reinstall windows. there must be a way to recover the mbr/transfer it to a different drive. what are you supposed to do if the mbr drive fails?

 

[ArtPog]

I mean no disrespect, but it's very difficult to understand your query.

1. Presumably your 1 TB SSD boot drive containing the Win 10 OS boots & functions without any problems, right? Can we assume it's partitioned with the MBR scheme?

2. You also have a secondary 1 TB HDD used for storage purposes which you're planning to "retire" following the transfer of data from that 1 TB HDD to your new 4 TB HDD. Is that right?

3. You say that when you installed the Win 10 OS on your 1 TB SSD "it put the MBR...on the old spindle drive". What in the world is the meaning of this? I take it the "old spindle drive" is the 1 TB HDD you're planning to "retire".

The OS does not "put" a partition scheme on a secondary drive except when the contents of a boot drive containing an OS is cloned to another drive.

4. So what do you mean when you indicate that you want to "get the MBR transferred" to your SSD boot drive? Presumably you partitioned/formatted the SSD when you installed the OS and you could select the MBR partitioning scheme (which ordinarily would have been the default) at that time. In any event you've inferred the system boots & functions just fine, right?

5. Of course you can partition your 4 TB GPT-style since you obviously want your system to recognize the complete disk-space capacity of that drive.

 

[vinegarjoe]

Thanks for your clarification questions. No disrespect taken. See below for my attempt at clarification.

I mean no disrespect, but it's very difficult to understand your query.

1. Presumably your 1 TB SSD boot drive containing the Win 10 OS boots & functions without any problems, right? Can we assume it's partitioned with the MBR scheme?

As long as the old storage (spindle) drive is plugged in, windows 10 boots fine. If I remove the old storage drive i get an error at boot. Can't remember the exact wording off hand but it's the same kind of error when there is no bootable disk or MBR gets corrupted (happened to me back in XP days and I used the install disk\recovery\cmd prompt\bootrec /fixmbr to repair it). this tells me that the MBR (or the windows 10 equivalent) is located on the old spindle drive and not on the SSD where windows 10 is installed.

2. You also have a secondary 1 TB HDD used for storage purposes which you're planning to "retire" following the transfer of data from that 1 TB HDD to your new 4 TB HDD. Is that right?

correct. I have already transferred the data.

3. You say that when you installed the Win 10 OS on your 1 TB SSD "it put the MBR...on the old spindle drive". What in the world is the meaning of this? I take it the "old spindle drive" is the 1 TB HDD you're planning to "retire".

The OS does not "put" a partition scheme on a secondary drive except when the contents of a boot drive containing an OS is cloned to another drive.

I'm almost positive that at some point in the past I had windows xp or windows 7 or both at different times installed on the old 1tb spindle drive. I have since deleted the OS partition(s) from that drive and have been using it solely for data storage.

How I'm using the term "MBR:" From wikipedia:
"The MBR also contains executable code to function as a loader for the installed operating system—usually by passing control over to the loader's second stage, or in conjunction with each partition's volume boot record (VBR). This MBR code is usually referred to as a boot loader."

See below for further explanation

4. So what do you mean when you indicate that you want to "get the MBR transferred" to your SSD boot drive? Presumably you partitioned/formatted the SSD when you installed the OS and you could select the MBR partitioning scheme (which ordinarily would have been the default) at that time. In any event you've inferred the system boots & functions just fine, right?

Process I used to upgrade windows 7 to windows 10:
1) I downloaded and created a windows 10 pro install DVD from microsoft.
2) I installed a clean copy of windows 7 onto my then brand new samsung 1TB SSD. Usually I try to disconnect all drives except the one I intend to install the OS when I do an install of windows. There was a lot going on at the time I upgraded and must have left my storage drive connected.
3) I used the windows 10 install dvd to upgrade to windows 10. I went through all the customize features, formatted the SSD etc. I have installed windows XP and 7 many times and the process was very similar.

According to windows disk management utility disk 0 (samsung SSD) is "partition style: Master Boot Record (MBR)" It has 3 volumes: 1) C: - 930.58GB NTFS Primary partition; 2) 500MB unallocated; 3) 450MB recovery partition

As is, if I disconnect all drives except the SSD which is where windows 10 is installed, the computer will not boot. I wish to repair, transfer, create, or whatever is necessary short of a complete reinstall to allow me to boot into windows 10 if only the system drive is connected to the computer. I know this is possible since years ago I dinked around with putting windows, Linux, and OS X on my PC. As part of that process, either linux or OS X added a boot loader which allowed me to select an OS at startup. This boot loader supplanted the windows MBR without overwriting it. But this was probably 10 years ago, and I have had a difficult time finding an answer with windows 10.

5. Of course you can partition your 4 TB GPT-style since you obviously want your system to recognize the complete disk-space capacity of that drive.

yes.

 

[DR_Luke]

i would really like to avoid having to reinstall windows. there must be a way to recover the mbr/transfer it to a different drive. what are you supposed to do if the mbr drive fails?

In theory, every windows hard drive will have its own MBR. The MBR is the table of partitions on the drive. The only way that your SSD would not have an MBR is if you had the two drives joined together in a hardware RAID with the HDD being the first drive holding sector 0 of the new RAID drive.

I've never seen it happen, but I suppose it is possible to have installed the windows hidden boot partition on the hdd, while putting the main OS partition on the SSD. But, that would be very weird.

Are you able to post a screenshot of what the drives show in DiskManagement?

 

[vinegarjoe]

here's a link to a screen shot of my disk management screen. At present I only have 2 hard drives (1tb ssd disk 0, and old 1tb spindle disk 1) connected in an effort to isolate the problem.
http://

 

[DR_Luke]

I can't say that I've ever seen the main OS drive automatically partitioned in that order. Here is a screen shot of my disk management for a Windows 10 default config - https://www.recoveryforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DiskManagment.jpg

The 500MB System partition at the front is the boot partition needed to load the OS. For some reason, you drive has the partition after the main OS partition and is not showing the contents and says unallocated. I've seen this partition get messed up before where I've litterally had to overwrite it with a copy from another drive and then set it as a primary, active partition. It might work in your case, but it will depend on your ability to figure out how to do it.

 

[vinegarjoe]

Pretty sure I figured it out. I created a 100mb partition on the ssd, assigned it a drive letter, and marked that partition as active. I used the bootrec and bcdedit commands in the windows install recovery dvd command prompt. Though, I can't say for sure what exact commands I used since i worked on this for several hours trying various things.

Here are some links I used to figure it out.

https://neosmart.net/wiki/bootrec/

I had issues with bootrec /rebuildbcd showing the windows partition but then saying requested system device cannot be found which led me here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-2863111/bcd-repair-requested-system-device-found-windows.html

and here

http://superuser.com/questions/302603/problem-recreating-bcd-on-windows-7-64bit-the-requested-system-device-cannot-b

In any case, I'm typing this message from my windows 10 pc with only the 1tb SSD connected.

 

[ArtPog]

"Process I used to upgrade windows 7 to windows 10:
1) I downloaded and created a windows 10 pro install DVD from microsoft.
2) I installed a clean copy of windows 7 onto my then brand new samsung 1TB SSD. Usually I try to disconnect all drives except the one I intend to install the OS when I do an install of windows. There was a lot going on at the time I upgraded and must have left my storage drive connected.
3) I used the windows 10 install dvd to upgrade to windows 10. I went through all the customize features, formatted the SSD etc. I have installed windows XP and 7 many times and the process was very similar. "

According to windows disk management utility disk 0 (samsung SSD) is "partition style: Master Boot Record (MBR)" It has 3 volumes: 1) C: - 930.58GB NTFS Primary partition; 2) 500MB unallocated; 3) 450MB recovery partition."

What apparently happened when you installed Win 10 on the Samsung SSD is that because your "storage" drive was connected at the time of the install the Win 10 it would appear the System Reserved partition was installed on that latter drive. If that was the case that would account for the fact that when you boot to the OS it's necessary for the "storage" drive to be connected in order to obtain a viable boot.

PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE MBR PARTITIONING SCHEME IS OF NO RELEVANCE IN THIS SITUATION.

"As is, if I disconnect all drives except the SSD which is where windows 10 is installed, the computer will not boot. I wish to repair, transfer, create, or whatever is necessary short of a complete reinstall to allow me to boot into windows 10 if only the system drive is connected to the computer. I know this is possible since years ago I dinked around with putting windows, Linux, and OS X on my PC. As part of that process, either linux or OS X added a boot loader which allowed me to select an OS at startup. This boot loader supplanted the windows MBR without overwriting it. But this was probably 10 years ago, and I have had a difficult time finding an answer with windows 10. "

If what I've surmised is correct (I was unable to access your screenshot), you can probably recoup relatively easily by cloning the contents of the SR partition on the "storage" drive to the 500 GB unallocated disk-space on the designated Samsung SSD boot drive.

 

[Paperdoc]

There's a good explanation and solution for your problem with retiring the 1 TB Black drive. But there is another issue entirely with your overall plan.

First, the "retiring" issue. I would bet you have been caught by a Window feature that causes this trouble for many. At the time you Install Windows 10 on a storage device (e.g., your SSD), the process goes looking for a second storage device, too. If it finds one present (e.g., your old 1TB Black unit) it places on that second device a semi-hidden Partition where it writes backup copies of important system files. The intent is that, at some future time if your boot device (the SSD) has a corrupted system file at boot time, the boot process will go find the backups on the other drive, copy over clean versions of what is needed, and then complete the boot process. It is designed to solve this problem for you with no trouble. Very nice idea. The "problem" people have discovered is that at EVERY boot event the process goes looking for those backup files and, if they are NOT present, it will not boot! That is what happens when you remove the 1 Tb Black unit.

What to do? It's not difficult, but you need your Windows Install disk, or at least a copy of one for the SAME version of Windows. First you disconnect all the storage devices in your machine except the one that is your boot device (the SSD). You put the Windows Install disk in the optical drive and boot into BIOS Setup so you can adjust the Boot Sequence. Set it to boot from the optical drive first, and secondly from the SSD, then SAVE and EXIT. The computer will reboot from the Install disk. Now, do NOT do a normal install. Look for a "Repair Install" option and run that. It will detect that there are no backup files on the only storage device present and put them there. Once that is done, you can cancel the Install, remove the Install disk, and reboot. The machine should boot up just fine with only the SSD present. Now you can shut down and re-connect all your other storage devices and boot up again to prove it works. If you then remove the Black unit and boot without it, there should be no trouble.

Now, we come to the "other issue". You want to start using a 4 TB HDD. To use any space over 2 TB, you MUST have that drive Partitioned using the GPT system, not the old MBR system. (You do NOT need UEFI support in BIOS for this since you are not going to try to boot from that large drive.) The PROBLEM is that Windows does NOT have any driver built into its 32-bit version for a GPT-Partitioned drive. Those drivers only are included in the 64-bit version. So if the Win 10 you have installed already on your SSD is the 32-bit version, it will not be able to use more than half the capacity of that new drive. (IF your Win 10 as installed already is 64-bit, IGNORE this problem - it's already solved!) To solve this issue, you either have to re-Install Win 10 in the 64-bit version (and I think that means a whole new "clean Install" of OS and applications), or you have to find a device driver for a GPT-Partitioned HDD that can be installed in the existing 32-bit version of Win 10. For this latter possibility, check the WD website for such a device driver.

 

[vinegarjoe]

There's a good explanation and solution for your problem with retiring the 1 TB Black drive. But there is another issue entirely with your overall plan.

First, the "retiring" issue. I would bet you have been caught by a Window feature that causes this trouble for many. At the time you Install Windows 10 on a storage device (e.g., your SSD), the process goes looking for a second storage device, too. If it finds one present (e.g., your old 1TB Black unit) it places on that second device a semi-hidden Partition where it writes backup copies of important system files. The intent is that, at some future time if your boot device (the SSD) has a corrupted system file at boot time, the boot process will go find the backups on the other drive, copy over clean versions of what is needed, and then complete the boot process. It is designed to solve this problem for you with no trouble. Very nice idea. The "problem" people have discovered is that at EVERY boot event the process goes looking for those backup files and, if they are NOT present, it will not boot! That is what happens when you remove the 1 Tb Black unit.

What to do? It's not difficult, but you need your Windows Install disk, or at least a copy of one for the SAME version of Windows. First you disconnect all the storage devices in your machine except the one that is your boot device (the SSD). You put the Windows Install disk in the optical drive and boot into BIOS Setup so you can adjust the Boot Sequence. Set it to boot from the optical drive first, and secondly from the SSD, then SAVE and EXIT. The computer will reboot from the Install disk. Now, do NOT do a normal install. Look for a "Repair Install" option and run that. It will detect that there are no backup files on the only storage device present and put them there. Once that is done, you can cancel the Install, remove the Install disk, and reboot. The machine should boot up just fine with only the SSD present. Now you can shut down and re-connect all your other storage devices and boot up again to prove it works. If you then remove the Black unit and boot without it, there should be no trouble.

Now, we come to the "other issue". You want to start using a 4 TB HDD. To use any space over 2 TB, you MUST have that drive Partitioned using the GPT system, not the old MBR system. (You do NOT need UEFI support in BIOS for this since you are not going to try to boot from that large drive.) The PROBLEM is that Windows does NOT have any driver built into its 32-bit version for a GPT-Partitioned drive. Those drivers only are included in the 64-bit version. So if the Win 10 you have installed already on your SSD is the 32-bit version, it will not be able to use more than half the capacity of that new drive. (IF your Win 10 as installed already is 64-bit, IGNORE this problem - it's already solved!) To solve this issue, you either have to re-Install Win 10 in the 64-bit version (and I think that means a whole new "clean Install" of OS and applications), or you have to find a device driver for a GPT-Partitioned HDD that can be installed in the existing 32-bit version of Win 10. For this latter possibility, check the WD website for such a device driver.

Good summation of my problem. Thankfully I seem to have already solved it. Onto the 4TB drive....

I'm old school in terms of partitions.... most of my computing life (until the last build or so with SSDs) I've had 1 drive with multiple partitions (system, storage, second OS, etc.). Back in the day, different parts of the spindle were faster (outer part moves faster than inner part of a circle). So, you would put the system drive first since it would use the outer part then move inner and get a minor speed boost and put your storage (pics/docs etc.) in the inner slower part, or so the prevailing thought went.

Aside from the obvious pros/cons of organization (partitions somewhat like directories) vs one large volume is there any reason to go 1 big 4TB GPT over several smaller partitions or vice versa? I'm using 64bit windows. I've already partitioned the 4TB drive into one or two 1TB partitions leaving the rest unallocated until I need it. However, it is still pretty much just a copy of what was on the old drive, so it wouldn't take that much to re-format and start over.

Eventually I'd like to get some more backup. Getting another identical hard drive to setup raid 1 is out of my budget at the moment but appealing. So I'm leaning towards getting an external drive to run off my router and configure regular backups. I spent extra to get the WD RE and 5yr warranty hoping the drive will hold up longer than the cheaper options. I realize the warranty doesn't mean anything if the drive fails, rather the idea that a 5 yr warranty should be less likely to fail than a 2yr. But I digress. Back to raid 1: ideally you run identical drives, but what if I ran the RE as the main drive and got a Blue for the mirrored drive as a backup. They are nearly half the cost, or is that asking for trouble down the line. I know....at the end of the day, how much are my 30k+ pictures worth if the drive(s) were to fail?

 

[DR_Luke]

So, do I get best answer for pointing you to fix the 100MB boot partition?

 

[Paperdoc]

I tend not to do the multiple Partition thing, but that's just my preference. I know that one advantage of doing that is that, if ONE partition get corrupted, you can wipe it clean and re-use it by restoring its former contents. Of course, that assumes you have good backups already.

I really discourage the thought that RAID1 is an automatic backup. It fails to meet several requirements for a good backup system. First, of course, is that any change you make to that system is made immediately on BOTH halves of the array, so you do not have a backup of the pre-change files. That can happen because you intended to make a change (and later regretted it), your made an error, or some malware corrupted your files. Second, ideally a backup storage device will be disconnected from your system so it cannot be harmed or corrupted when not in use, AND stored in a different location. For these reasons, a separate backup device like an external drive unit is much better, along with some decent backup software.

On a practical level, mis-matching drive units in a RAID1 will usually be trouble. If they are the same size but different performance, that will make your system a little slower. But if they are of different capacities, you can only make a RAID array with the SMALLER capacity, and the remainder of the space on the larger drive is useless Unallocated Space. So, while I agree with your reasoning for using a cheaper Blue unit, I think it would be best used as a separate backup unit (e.g. in an external enclosure, etc.) rather than as part of a RAID1 array.

FYI, the best use of a RAID1 array system is in cases where you cannot tolerate any significant downtime during normal operations, but can repair the system during scheduled "after hours" time. For example, I use RAID1 in a Point of Sale system in our small retail store. We really cannot have it quit during the business day, and normally there is nobody in the store with technical skills to fix it quickly. So, if one drive unit fails, the array system just keeps on working. AFTER the store is closed I can go in, diagnose the problem, acquire a replacement drive unit, and repair/restore the array. It might even take several days to get the part and do the repair, and all through that time the system will still be able to operate. I take periodic backup copies of the important data off it and move them to a different drive at my home.