Been a long time since I've been active on the forum so first of all, hello to everyone. Hope you're all well and keeping safe. Jumping right into the question, is there a way that i can convert a logical partition, with an install of windows on it, into a primary partition on another hard drive? Can I do this in a way that it can be made to work as a bootable drive? So a bit of backstory behind this. The computer in question is one that started life way back in 2008. At that time there was no windows 10 or even 7 and Vista wasn't really an option, so I was using Windows XP. However, I was also using windows 2000 on and off for reasons of nostalgia. Rather stupidly, at the time I set this up with Windows 2000 on a primary partition and Windows XP on a logical partition. This has forever kept me in a situation where, if I want to get rid of the windows 2000 partition, I'll loose the Windows XP partition or it won' work as a boot drive. Fast forward 13 years and I still have the same PC (albeit almost every component has been replaced multiple times) with the same data on it. I have of course upgraded to Windows 7 and then to Windows 10 but these are installed on separate drives. Here's a pic of all my partitions: As you can see, it's all very cluttered and not ideal. What I want to do is delete the Windows 2000 partition (2000 doesn't even work with my current hardware anyway) and move the windows XP partition onto my SATA SSD. Therefore leaving my SATA HDD as just a DATA drive and my SSD dual booting windows 7 and XP. I've tried to do it before by simply cloning the XP partition onto another drive but this won't work as it's not a boot drive. Is there any way that this can be done? Please, please, please don't tell me that I should just get rid of XP as well. I still use it for a few programs that don't run on anything newer and for games that use EAX sound. Thanks everyone EDIT: Should probably add, I plan to swap the current SATA SSD for a 500GB one which is coming from my other PC as it has been made redundant due to a recent upgrade. So the extra space should make it possible to fit both the Windows 7 and Windows XP partitions on one drive.
https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager-guide/convert-logical-partition-to-primary.html "I want to convert logical partition to primary partition, but I cannot find any function is available in Disk Management. Can anyone show me how to convert logical partition to primary without losing data?” Although Windows Disk Management and File Explorer don't offer the option to change between logical and primary partition, you can convert logical partition to primary partition without losing data with partition manager software - EaseUS Partition Master. How to Convert Logical Partition to Primary Partition EaseUS Partition Master provides full partition converting wizards. There is no need to delete or format your hard drive before partition converting. You can use it to: Change partition from logical to primary or from primary to logic. Convert MBR disk to GPT disk or vice versa. Convert file system from FAT32 to NTFS or from NTFS to FAT32. Convert dynamic disk to basic disk and vice versa.
Thanks for the reply. I tried using that program to clone the windows xp partition to the new drive and then convert it to a primary partition. Unfortunately it still isn't bootable. I guess it's just missing the boot data. Do you think it would work if I installed a fresh copy of Windows xp first, then cloned my existing one on top of it?
