My goal is to copy the four partitions associated with Windows 10, plus a fifth partition that I have on another drive. The Windows partitions are on an MBR drive, the fifth partition is on a GPT drive (and fills that entire drive). I want to turn a new disk into a GPT disk with all five partitions, that I can boot Windows from. I want to maintain the same drive letters for these partitions (removing the original drives), to create a seamless experience.
I have done this kind of thing in the past, but not with GPT, and not with Win10 and its four partitions. My approach was
- clone the Windows disk (all four partitions) to the new disk with Macrium Reflect 8 (free edition)
- convert it to GPT with
DISKPART(as a clone of the MBR disk it was also MBR) - clone the fifth partition over into the remaining space (Reflect again)
I did this, and am basically running off of the new drive entirely as I want to—except that if I remove the old drive, it no longer boots. With the old drive, it loads the new copy of Windows, but the actual boot sequence, it seems, depends on the old drive.
I now know that the issue is with the MBR→GPT conversion there: that does not produce the necessary EFI or unallocated partitions in front of the OS.
To fix that, I tried to add another step:
- Fix Windows Boot Problems using that option from Macrium’s Rescue Media
But I haven’t gotten that working.
Can my existing clone of the appropriate partitions be salvaged to create a bootable drive? If not, what do I have to do to create one with these partitions?
