Two Separate Drives and Win11 OS

[Brian K]

Friendly, what do you mean by "no go"?

Is Microsoft.002 in the Boot File field for the copy?

[Friendly]

I meant that it would not boot to my 860. I do not recall the exact details, but even the copying process, at some point, a message appeared in upper right of the monitor stating, “Missing something or couldn’t find something.” I reverted everything back, but I'm tempted to try again. I truly do not understand what I'm missing. It was booting to the copied drive, now this and I followed the same steps as when it worked before. I appreciate the flexibility of the BootIt menu. I have been going over our thread to see if I overlooked anything, but it does not appear I did. I resized the Windows 11 OS to 100000 and again, slightly larger, yet both attempts resulted in same outcome. I may try again tomorrow, or perhaps later tonight.

[Brian K]

A suggestion worth trying. Good luck.

Delete the copied Win11 partition on the 860, The 860 will now only contain the MSR.
Restore your image (taken prior to the BIU copy) to the 8100. Restore the ESP, Win11 and RE. You will now have the ESP and Win11 you had a few days ago.
Resize Win11 to 100000 MiB.
Do the BIU copy procedure.

[Brian K]

If you like you can do a second BIU copy to the remaining Free Space on the 860. This gives you 3 Win11 OS.
You could either copy the Win11 on the 8100 or the Win11 on the 860.

This will be a good test.

[Friendly]

Thanks, Brian. I really want to make this work, so I’m open to any suggestions, it’s all worth trying. Last night, I deleted and formatted the entire 860, so it’s now completely empty. The SN is a new image I created months ago, but updated last night e.g. chipset, drivers, and MS updates, then saved it for future use. I do this every few months to stay current and keep my PC updated, and if needed, I can reload that image within seconds.

The 860 is completely free and unpartitioned, and I just want to be sure I follow your suggestions precisely. Should I go back to your earlier step-by-step guide, or would it be better to follow your latest suggestion?

As I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t do this alone, it does take some knowledge, and you’re the right person for the job. But it’s not rocket science, and you’ve made your instructions easy to follow, so maybe we can go through it step by step again and it should work.
My 860 is empty and unlocated, so where should I start if we take it in baby steps?

[Friendly]

Since my 860 is clean and unallocated, should I restore the Windows 11 image from SN to the 860 and then follow the latest suggestion?
You mentioned having several Windows installations done that way, so I must be missing something in my process.

If I don't give up, I know one day I will go.... OH that's why and that is why I appreciate your help and patients very much.

[Brian K]

The 860 is completely free and unpartitioned,

Friendly, it should not be that way. It should have a 16 MiB MSR as it is a GPT disk. Can you check in Partition Work and see if a MSR is present?

[Friendly]

I know I'm keep making mistake, but soon enough it will work, I know it. As I mentioned, my 860 was formatted and clean then after shrinking SN's OS to 10000 and tried to copy to 860, at the end of it I got a window "Unable to openBOOTIT.DAT."

I have a feeling we are closer to resolve this, thank you for your patience.

So, how should I prepare the drive to be copied to in this case 860 and it works I will use it for a future reference?

Also, this might be silly question, but where BootIt gets installed?

To answer your question, just checked, no there is only 100000 NFTS/exFAT/HPFS/+ and free space

[Brian K]

BIU is installed to the ESP.

[Friendly]

Ok Thank you.
So please tell me how I should go about this with 860, how to prepare and which instruction should I follow.