Windows 8 Testing – Part 2 – The Migration
Last week I mentioned that I installed Windows 8 on my office PC and that I wanted to migrate it to a bigger already being used disk. You may also remember that I mentioned that Windows 8 (as well as Vista and Windows 7) now uses a BCD store for booting.
Well my first attempt did not go so well. Although I was able to clone the disk to the bigger drive, I ran into some issues on the reboot, receiving an error and not being able to boot my PC.
Here is where that rescue disk I also mentioned came in handy. Booting off of the rescue disk, it automatically determined I was having a booting issue and offered to repair it for me, which I let it do. It came back with a message that it had found and repaired my Windows installation. I rebooted, and low and behold, I was presented with a boot menu of 3 different OS’s to boot into.
This seemed strange to me but I took the first option it presented which booted me into my Windows 8 installation…all is good, so I thought.What I noticed is that my installation resided on the D drive (which is the larger and target drive I was migrating to) and not the C drive like normal. So I rebooted, this time I chose the second option for Windows 8, which booted into the C drive installation which was to original drive. Head scratcher huh?
After stepping back a bit, and thinking, I decided to try again. Being that Windows 8 uses the BCD store, I re-evaluated my task, and figured out exactly what happened. When I installed Windows 8 on a secondary drive, it also installed the bootloader (BCD Store) on that drive, this caused my initial error on reboot after the migration.
I was able to find a GUI driven software that allow me to manipulate the bootloader, it offered things like what drive it is installed on, what options (other OS’s) I could boot into, etc. So knowing the rules of the game this time, I re-cloned my drive after I made some changes to the bootloader, after the reboot, I also needed to make a change to my boot order in the BIOS of the PC too. And guess what? It worked without flaw, booted into my now migrated Windows 8 installation on the larger drive, it also had the correct drive letter of C.
This probably took a little more time than necessary, but I also learned quite a bit from my mistakes (I’m only human right?) the first time around.
More Windows 8 info coming soon!
If you have any system questions or concerns, call the CCS Retail Systems Support Department at 800.672.4806 or email us.
-Bryan