I tried posting this on another MS community forum, but was redirected to this one. I feel a bit apprehensive about posting here under the Windows 8 IT Pro heading because I'm very much not an IT pro... Anyway:
I have a UEFI PC, the main disk of which was a 2TB GPT formatted HD with the usual 300MB recovery, 100MB EFI, 128GB Win 8.1 boot, and the remaining space as a data partition.
The original Win 8.1 boot partition has loads of specialised and greedy applications installed that I only use when working for a particular client, so when I'm not doing stuff for him, I wanted to be able to choose to boot to a clean installation with just the stuff I require for ordinary day-to-day work. I also wanted to take advantage of SSD speed when I need to use the cluttered Windows.
So I got a 250GB SSD, bought and installed a fresh Win 8.1, allocating 82GB for the installation. The installer created the usual 300MB recovery, 100MB EFI, and an 80GB boot partition, on which I installed the relatively few items I need for day-to-day work.
Then with Macrium Reflect, I cloned the cluttered boot partition from the old drive on to 128GB of the remaining space on my SSD (as drive F: ), and used EasyBCD to add the cloned partition to the BCD list. I was hoping that if I could successfully boot to that installation, it would see itself as drive C:, and automatically allocate another letter to the new lean installation
However, when I try to boot to this, the UEFI BIOS restarts, but I end up with a blank screen. In case this had something to do with disk signature collision, I disconnected the HD, but that didn't help. So I deleted the cloned partition, re-connected the HD and tried EasyBCD again, replacing the previous addition with one for the original boot partition on the HDD, but got the same result.
I'm sure this is because I don't understand how BCD works. And no doubt UEFI makes thing ten times as difficult.
Anyhow, I'd be very grateful for some advice as to how to make multiple boot work.
