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August 30th, 2023 04:11
XPS 8960, dual boot to SSD or HDD
I bought an XPS 8960 to replace a very old Dell Dimension E510 running Win10 on a 2TB HDD. I would like to dual boot the XPS to its stock NVMe SSD (drive C:) Win11 or to the old HDD from the E510. So I installed the old HDD into the XPS (this showed up as an F: drive in Win11, NTFS, Healthy, IFS partition, Boot volume. It works fine as a data disk). I used bcdboot F:\Windows to create a boot menu for this drive, but when I try to boot from this drive I get the following error: "a required file is missing or contains errors" 0xc0000359 \Windows\system32\winload.efi
I tried booting from a Win10 USB stick (secure boot off) thinking I might be able to recover Win10 on the old HDD, but it could not see any of the two HDDs on the XPS. Not sure what to try next. Any ideas?
ejn63
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August 30th, 2023 12:33
I think the E510 dates from the early 2000s, meaning there's no way the system has a UEFI boot option, further meaning the drive is in MBR format -- which cannot be used as a boot device in a UEFI-only system like the 8960. You'd need to wipe and re-initialize the hard drive in GPT layout to use it as a boot device in your new desktop system.
MTimperley
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August 31st, 2023 02:35
@ejn63 Thanks for the info, and yes, the E510 is an old one, a testament to Dell quality, I think!
dude2356
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December 3rd, 2023 15:18
MTimperley I know this info is late but I wanted to let you know that the info you were provided is not accurate. ejn63 is correct that your drive is currently in MBR mode and will not work as a UEFI boot option because the drive needs to be in GPT mode, but there are ways to convert the drive from MBR to GPT. Look into using the Windows 10 built in MBR2GPT.exe tool. From WinRE, you use the MBR2GPT tool to convert your MBR drive to GPT, then go into your BIOS and make sure that the drive is reading as an AHCI/NVME drive and NOT as RAID. If it still will not boot, delete the boot mapping and remap the boot to efi\boot\bootx64.efi and it should boot. I have done this 20-30 times over the years so I know this works. This option became available back in Win 10 ver. 1703.
Also as a heads up, this is how you convert old Windows 7 upgraded to Windows 10 installations to work on today's equipment. My personal OS installation is over 12 years old. It started as Windows 7, upgraded to 10, then upgraded to 11 using the method above. I hate to reload and try to avoid it at all costs.