GRUB put a bootloader on the wrong drive

[Essence_of_War]

I have an SSD and an HDD in my desktop. Their partition layout is as follows:

SSD :
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 426959504 213478728+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 * 426959505 488391145 30715820+ 83 Linux

HDD :
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2 206848 3775957167 1887875160 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb3 3775959040 3907028991 65534976 82 Linux swap / Solaris

So basically a 200ish GB (/dev/sda1) partition for windows system and a 30ish GB (/dev/sdb2) partition for Linux on the SSD. A ~100 MB (/dev/sdb1) system reserved partition, an almost 2TB (/dev/sdb2) NTFS partition for storage, and a 64 GB (/dev/sdb3) partition for linux's swap space.

I wanted to upgrade the hard drive to a 4 TB one, and while I was at it, switch over to GPT. I didn't really give much thought to the system reserved partition before on /dev/sdb1 before, but I'm pretty sure it's actually my windows bootloader. When GRUB loads at boot time, the menu entry is "Windows 7 (on /dev/sdb)" and I'm not really sure how it got there. I installed windows to my SSD alone, then installed ubuntu, and told ubuntu to put GRUB on /dev/sda. I double checked that GRUB is on /dev/sda by dd'ing the first 512 bytes piped to strings and it comes up with what I'd expect to see for GRUB.

So...what do I do here? 😕 I guess I could just clone the whole drive and I'd be fine, but this seems like a good opportunity to get the bootloader back in the right place maybe, like with the rest of the windows system drive.

 

[TheELF]

I didn't really give much thought to the system reserved partition before on /dev/sdb1 before, but I'm pretty sure it's actually my windows bootloader.

No,the bootloader is at the start of the disk,this is the boot partition through which tells the pc where to boot from thats why grub points to it,and there should be no way for it to be on a different drive than the windows installation,except if you had windows on the big drive in the past.

 

[Essence_of_War]

No,the bootloader is at the start of the disk,this is the boot partition through which tells the pc where to boot from thats why grub points to it,and there should be no way for it to be on a different drive than the windows installation,except if you had windows on the big drive in the past.

OK. That partition is definitely the windows boot partition, then. When I check windows disk management it has the "active" and "boot" flags and gparted recognizes it as having the "boot" flag as well.

I've never had windows installed on that larger HDD before, but I did make the n00b mistake of having the SSD and HDD both connected while I was installing windows to the SSD.

 

[Essence_of_War]

OK, I think I understand a little better what happened now. This isn't GRUB's fault at all, it is mine.

I had pre-formatted my SSD for a spot for both windows and ubuntu and there was no free space. However, I had my unformatted HDD in at the same time, so I think windows saw unformatted space, and just tossed the system reserved partition there along with the boot manager.

What I really want to do is move the system reserved partition, but since this is no longer a nix software question, I have posted the specific question to the OS forum. Thanks!