Please consider this scenario...

Win 7 is on drive 0.  Win 8.1 is on drive 1.
At start up a DOS-type screen offers to boot from either.

A new, blank SATA drive that is larger than drive 1 is connected.
Then the PC is booted to old drive 1 and Acronis is used to dupe drive 1 it to the blank drive.

As old drive 1 is listed as "active, boot, primary, page file"... if given the choice during cloning should the new drive be marked as "active?"

Once done, the PC is shut down and old drive 1 disconnected.  At reboot, will new drive 1 boot as did its predecessor - from the dual boot menu - though its hardware is different?  Or will the dual boot have vanished?

If all is well, I want to wipe the old drive.  When it's reconnected, should boot up from that drive be selected in the BIOS, to avoid conflict with the new drive?

Gracias

• Edited by borate Tuesday, November 05, 2013 2:45 PM

If Disk1, which contains Windows 8.1, is a single partition and is marked as active, that means it has the boot files for your boot menu. That is, presuming you are using whatever Windows 8.1 had setup and not some third party kit like Grub4DOS. I've seen strange behaviour when (and if) you can force 2 active partitions. Either your PC won't boot or the first active partition will boot.

Alternatively, what would happen is either it would fail to make the 3rd disk active, or it would make it active and remove that flag from the original disk.

I would recommend that you clone the disk, and then make sure you do not have both disks connected at the same time when you boot the new one. I would then format the old disk in another system once confirming the dual boot works with the new disk.

If Disk1, which contains Windows 8.1, is a single partition and is marked as active, that means it has the boot files for your boot menu.

I would recommend that you clone the disk, and then make sure you do not have both disks connected at the same time when you boot the new one. I would then format the old disk in another system once confirming the dual boot works with the new disk.

     Disk 1 has contains two partitions.  Only the one that houses 8.1 is active, boot.  The other is listed as a "logical partition."

     Your suggestion to format old disk 1 in another system sounds like a safer bet than confusion that might result from attempting to boot while identically populated drives are connected.  Thanks.

Hi,

Could you do that like Tripredacus suggested? How is the current situation?

You could disconnect the old one, then try to boot to see if the new one could boot the computer.

If the new one is ensured to boot, then you could format the old one by different system.

Best regards

Unfortunately, this didn't go well.  The cloning was fine, but the dual boot MBR was hosed and the new 2Tb disk containing W8.1 would not boot:  "mismatched O/S."

Eventually, the MBR was restored, and both the W7 and W8.1 disks boot.

But through a comedy of unwitting errors, now there's 59Gb of unallocated space on the new 2Tb disk, and it's listed in PROPERTIES|VOLUME as an MBR partition type.  That 59Gb is the same size as one of two partitions on the former, 120Gb drive, and that's a lot of space wasted on an MBR.

There's now no option on either partition of the new disc to "extend" ... but there was when first I checked.  However, I cancelled out when it indicated something to the effect that boot would be lost.

Win some, lose some.  I'm in too deep. ^_^