Question System and Boot on separate drives, do I reset windows to upgrade or try to fix?

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Kusky

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Nov 3, 2013
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So I was wanting to make my PC eligible for Windows 11. I enabled TPM but then saw I also needed secure boot. In order to enable Secure boot I needed convert my C drive from MBR to GPT. After a little while searching how to, i attempted to but it failed to validate. I tried another program that did the same thing, and it warned against doing so as the system and boot were not on the same drive. Probably explains why the initial validate failed. So my question is, should I try to move them to the same drive, I looked how and it looks pretty messy and risky. Or should I format/reset windows and disconnect the other drives so I get both my system and boot on the same drive? But my concern is, will I even be able to initiate a reset or fresh install after Ive disconnected the drive with the system on it? How would it run etc.

I remember when windows upgrades were a lot simpler :).
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
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can you right click start
choose disk management
expand the next window so it shows all details of upper and lower area
take a screenshot and upload image to an image sharing website and show link here,

Should be able to fix it without changing windows.
A reset wouldn't fix it as the problem would still exist afterwards.
 

Kusky

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Nov 3, 2013
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can you right click start
choose disk management
expand the next window so it shows all details of upper and lower area
take a screenshot and upload image to an image sharing website and show link here,

Should be able to fix it without changing windows.
A reset wouldn't fix it as the problem would still exist afterwards.

View: https://imgur.com/a/Alh5L4L


Can see System is on disk 0 which is my HDD, and boot is on my smaller SSD meant for the OS.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
That is what happens when you don't take the old drive out when installing windows on a new one, it just adds itself onto the boot partition of previous install.

its also put the page file on E drive. Windows sure spread itself around. You can move the page file now if you want to, that doesn't require any messing around. depends on if you planned on removing it at any stage.

But moving/creating the boot info can take a bit of messing around. Its possible @SkyNetRising can help you with that

Otherwise, I think it be faster to just start again. WIn 10 will want to install as GPT if it sees PC can run it, so that fixes the other problem
copy anything off C you need to keep
take all the drives out except the C drive when you go to install windows
follow this guide: https://forums.tomshardware.com/faq/how-to-do-a-clean-installation-of-windows-10.3170366/
once pc boots up a few times from the ssd, turn pc off and put the other drives back in.

shame you can't just install win 11 from here since you clean installing anyway. I suspect like win 10 before it, you need to update to win 11 to get the right licence.
 
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