Solved Swap OS Installations Around (Dual Boot Win11 Pro)

Hey guys,

I am not sure if the title is clear enough and hope this is the correct section to post. Here is the current situation: Daily Win11 Pro installed on M2_1 (top M2 slot) and 2nd Win11 Pro installed on SATA SSD.

I would like to move my daily OS to a new M2 drive which is installed in the M2_2 slot (below the GPU), and then move 2nd OS to M2_1. Hopefully the screenshot will make it clearer.



What I want to accomplish:

Step 1 - Move 1 to 2
Step 2 - Move 3 to 1

I guess I should use Macrium to clone 1 to 2 and set BIOS boot drive to 2. But not sure that would be enough for Step 1 alone. Maybe need some bcdedit magic? And then also need to manage Step 2.

I switch between the two using the legacy boot menu if that would make a difference.

So, mission accomplished!

Thanks to SIW2's help offered in Cloning and backup question(s) thread and Chatgpt I could easily manage what I wanted to.

Steps were:

1. Clone 2 to 1
2. Set boot drive to 2 in BIOS. EFI was still pointing to 1.
3. Set {bootmgr} to EFI on 2. At this stage (in Partition Wizard) EFI 2 was marked both Active and System, while EFI 1 was only Active.
4. Format 1 with Partition Wizard since Disk Management can't format an EFI partition.

5. Clone 3 to 1
6. Set devicepath to second OS system partition on 1



Irrelevant to this thread, next, move 3 to laptop which has a 256 GB SSD and pretty much out of space :) Just cloning and some screws. Nothing biggy.

All is working well.