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I've been using a 120GB SSD as my Windows drive for years and recently it's been giving me errors so I bought a new SSD before it failed completely.

I installed Windows 10 to the new drive with no issues (well, mostly no issues anyway) but I left the old drive connected so I could pull my old data from it. I've since learned that was a mistake but the ship has sailed unfortunately.

I came to remove the old SSD today and found that my PC wouldn't boot up because the boot sector wasn't installed to the new drive so when the old drive was removed there was no boot command.

I've used MiniTool Partition Wizard and can see a 99MB partition on the old drive of type "GPT (EFI System partition) which is status "Active & System" so am I right in thinking this is the boot partition? I've created an unallocated sector on the new SSD but need to pay to move partitions with MiniTool (I don't even know if copying it would work).

How do I go about creating a boot partition on my new drive?

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  • When installing Windows to a new drive make sure the old one is disconnected to make it impossible for the Windows setup to use the old drive e.g. for writing/reusing the bootsector or other partitions required for boot.
    – Robert
    Commented Jan 7, 2021 at 9:07
  • Yep. I've never installed Windows to a fresh drive before so it was a learning experience for me. I had no idea the boot sector could end up on a different drive but you live and learn.
    – maca2kx
    Commented Jan 7, 2021 at 19:11

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I had to bite the bullet and and reinstall Windows. I did it properly this time by disconnecting all other drives and now I've removed the old drive and Windows is still loading. There might be a way to rebuild the boot record and I tried several methods that said they would but I didn't find one that worked for me.

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  • The bootrecord can be restored quite easily, the bigger problem are the "helper partitions" Windows creates at install time. To manually create these partitions at the correct position with correct content us not very easy.
    – Robert
    Commented Jan 8, 2021 at 8:04

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