Win7/Win10 dual-boot transition question about moving logical volumes between disks

[BonzaiDuck]

So -- rabid poster that I've been here and there -- the history of my Win10 dual-boot upgrades is already shown in some other threads.

Looking down the road when I may want to purge the Win 7 OS from one or more systems, I can see that I can simply tweak a tab in msconfig and then remove the Win 7 logical volume, then use Acronis to expand the remaining Win 10 volume to fill the disk -- provided the volumes are on the same physical disk.

Both OS's seem to use the same 100MB "system-reserved" volume.

Two of my systems, for not having enough space on the original boot-system SSDs, have Win 10 installed as a logical volume on a second SSD.

Eventually, when I need to delete the Win 7 OS from those systems, how do I consolidate the Win 10 volumes on the same disk with the "System Reserved" 100MB volume? Or what sort of repair operation would I expect?

Any tips about this? I'm keeping notes about these things so I have something handy if eliminating the Win 7's takes me another year or two.

 

[Dahak]

For the System Reserved partition, this is usually where the Boot files are located

If you dual-boot from the Windows Boot Menu, most likely, System Reserved Partition on the first SSD, has the boot files that will allow you to select between Win7 and Win10.

To confirm this, is easy to disconnect/removed the first SSD and see if the the other one will boot.

If it does not, you would have to run a repair from the Win10 install media to replace the Boot files, if/when you get rid of Win7

 

[Elixer]

If you have GPT, this is how it looks like (and the first 2 are required)

If you are using MBR, then you would have just a system partition & a OS partition.
On my dual boot system, it is [SYSTEM RESERVED(350MB)] [OS1] [OS2]

If you want to make it easy, then OS1 should be the final OS you want on the drive, and OS2 would be the OS that you will eventually get rid of.
Though, you don't have to do that, you will end up doing a "Repair" on the drive, so it can get the partitions correct.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

For the System Reserved partition, this is usually where the Boot files are located

If you dual-boot from the Windows Boot Menu, most likely, System Reserved Partition on the first SSD, has the boot files that will allow you to select between Win7 and Win10.

To confirm this, is easy to disconnect/removed the first SSD and see if the the other one will boot.

If it does not, you would have to run a repair from the Win10 install media to replace the Boot files, if/when you get rid of Win7

You seem to understand something of how it works, but I can say that removing the 1st SSD with Win 7 and "system reserved" on it would certain be a problem, and I want to avoid that problem.

Only the "C: drive" logical volume for Win10 is on the second disk. It is, as you say, using the same system-reserved as the Win 7 -- because that is apparently the way they designed the dual-boot feature.

Instead, I'm explaining an objective to eventually move the Windows 10 from the second disk to the first, leaving the system-reserved 100MB volume intact.

Simply removing the Win7 option is easy: You'd simply enter MSCONFIG, select the Boot tab, remove the Windows 7 option from the two shown. Then, you'd simply delete the Windows 7 "C:-drive" volume from the disk.

If both "C:-drive" volumes for Win7 and Win10 are located on the same physical disk, you would only need to move or expand the Win10 logical volume to fill the entire physical disk. It would simply continue to use the "system reserved" area that had been there before Win 10 had been installed.

Instead, I'm faced with a prospect of moving the Win10 "C:-drive" logical volume from disk 2 to disk 1.

What can I expect with that?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

If you have GPT, this is how it looks like (and the first 2 are required)

If you are using MBR, then you would have just a system partition & a OS partition.
On my dual boot system, it is [SYSTEM RESERVED(350MB)] [OS1] [OS2]

If you want to make it easy, then OS1 should be the final OS you want on the drive, and OS2 would be the OS that you will eventually get rid of.
Though, you don't have to do that, you will end up doing a "Repair" on the drive, so it can get the partitions correct.

So you're saying that there's no procedure which would guarantee me a conversion that would not require a repair?

 

[Elixer]

So you're saying that there's no procedure which would guarantee me a conversion that would not require a repair?

You would need to have OS1 has the OS you want to keep be in partition 2, (Partition 1 is System reserve) anything else requires a repair install of the boot loader, since you are moving partitions around.

 

[Dahak]

So you're saying that there's no procedure which would guarantee me a conversion that would not require a repair?

Correct. Even if you clone the Win10 partition over the Win7 partition, you would still have to do a repair of some sort either manually or by the tools in the boot media. As the boot files still think there would be a 2nd partition where the win10 is suppose to be

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Correct. Even if you clone the Win10 partition over the Win7 partition, you would still have to do a repair of some sort either manually or by the tools in the boot media. As the boot files still think there would be a 2nd partition where the win10 is suppose to be

I guess the question I'd want the answer to is this one: Using the Windows 10 boot media repair option, would such a repair be successful? Or -- what if I created a "rescue," "restore" or "repair" disc? I've been in situations for which the simple boot-to-OS-media repair option fixed an unbootable OS. I've been in other situations where it asked for a "repair" disc -- and I didn't have one.

 

[Dahak]

I guess the question I'd want the answer to is this one: Using the Windows 10 boot media repair option, would such a repair be successful? Or -- what if I created a "rescue," "restore" or "repair" disc? I've been in situations for which the simple boot-to-OS-media repair option fixed an unbootable OS. I've been in other situations where it asked for a "repair" disc -- and I didn't have one.

The repair disk and the install media are effectively the same thing. The repair disc is just smaller as it does not have all the installer related stuff and will boot into the repair automatically.

Now as for an Automatic Repair, I have seen it both work and not work, and when it did not work I was able to do the repair manually and it was fine

 

[BonzaiDuck]

The repair disk and the install media are effectively the same thing. The repair disc is just smaller as it does not have all the installer related stuff and will boot into the repair automatically.

Now as for an Automatic Repair, I have seen it both work and not work, and when it did not work I was able to do the repair manually and it was fine

Could you give any tips for "manual repair?" I'm trying to remember if I ever even encountered such a thing. would this amount to fiddling with disk contents through boot-to-DOS? Or does the "Safe boot" feature in Windows play a part?

See -- ultimately -- now that Win 10 is activated, I could simply keep a list of software installations to it, recover my data files and back them up, and then reinstall it again with effortless activation. But if there's a way to save myself that trouble -- I want to follow the easiest path but with less uncertainty of the outcome.