Changing Boot drive with BCDBoot

Scott Hanselman is a consistently good source of useful info and commentary. Recently, he needed to change which drive his computer used as its System drive, which is to say the drive containing the boot loader and configuration.

( N.B. For some reason, the “System Drive” contains the boot info, and the “Boot Drive” contains the operating system. Why could this not have been corrected?!)

Scott points out his options:

Approach 1: Nuclear Option. Wipe and Start Over.

Approach 2: Copy the Hidden/System Boot Manager and Boot Folder over to the C: drive and run a tool called BCDEdit to move things around in 12 short steps. 😉

This was a scary prospect for me, because from my point of view, while this was a fairly advanced operation, I just wanted to switch where the boot info comes from.

Turns out there is a new (profoundly advanced, you have been warned) command line tool called BCDBoot.

See Scott’s blog post for more info. /me wonders if one could copy the bcdboot executable to a Vista system and perform the same operation.

Geoff
Sr. System Administrator at the University of Vermont

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