How to correctly boot into Windows D: drive after cloning

Question

I've recently bought a new SSD and successfully cloned the old HDD and all it's partition to the SSD resulting in a C: and D: drive.

I've added a new boot entry with bcdedit by copying over the already existing entry and just changing the osdevice and device parameters to partition=D:.

Now when i set the new entry as the default one in msconfig Boot tab and restart the PC it says that the new entry is loaded but in the parenthesis stands the C:\Windows??? If I change it again to the other one after booting it also says C:\Windows???

What the heck is happening here - either I made a mistake and it always loads the C: drive or is windows just insane and making me waste my time?

If windows somehow always displays the booted drive as C: drive i don't want to format the wrong storage device...

And insight into this will be of use to me, thanks.

Answer 1

By design and following all the MSDOS legacy compatibility from the 80's, Windows ALWAYS labels the disk/partition it boots as C:

So when Windows boots, it sets that booting partition as C: and starts labelling the other partitions/disks as new letters.

So, first of all, you will need to specify in BIOS/UEFI to boot from that DISK. Then when it is booted, you can use Windows Disk Management tool to find/identify the other disks/partitions and to verify if it really booted from the SSD. You can also use command line utility DISKPART to do this, but it's a bit harder, you would need to read a tutorial to use it and not destroy something by mistake.

Best way to check if the cloning was successful, is to unplug the old HDD and leave the SSD plugged alone and see if it boots. If it does, then you can plug the HDD back and check if it still boots from the SSD. Then afterwards you can deal with deleting the old partitions.

(Beware, there are hidden partitions on the disk, where it actually boots and then it loads windows from another partition, so you might remove the old windows partition on the HDD, but if for some reason the system tries to boot from the HDD, it will do it, but will throw an error because the windows partition it points to load is no longer there, so be careful)

Answer 2

In Windows the boot device is always labeled as C:.

If unsure, you may distinguish between the disks in Disk Management by their characteristics, such as total capacity and model-number.

To test, I would first physically disconnect the HDD and boot, to ensure that the SDD can serve as a boot device.

If this passes well, you may then reconnect the HDD, boot carefully, ensure that you booted from the right disk, then format the other one.