A computer generally has one drive to boot from, but you can also have multiple boot drives on a PC and boot from any of them. But first, you have to make sure there is an operating system installed on that drive.
What is a Boot Drive?
A Boot drive is the primary storage device which your PC loads the operating system from. An SSD and an HDD are the most common boot drives. But you can also use a USB flash drive as a boot device. Even CD drives can be used as a boot device, but they are now more or less obsolete. A boot drive may hold a bootable operating system. You can make any internal drive a bootable drive by installing a new operating system into it and then changing it to a bootable drive.
How to Change Boot Drive on Windows?
You will first have to install an operating system on the new drive to be able to boot from that drive. If you have multiple boot drives, you can change the boot order to make your PC boot into that drive first. You can either use the system BIOS or UEFI to change the boot order of your PC. The BIOS or UEFI interface may vary depending on its version, but the general process is similar for all. Changing the boot order of your PC will make it so that it loads files from the device on the top of the list. If you want to change your existing operating system to a new drive, you can clone the existing drive to a new one. You can use any third-party software to clone your existing drive and boot from the new drive. This method comes in handy when you are moving to a new drive but want to keep your old operating system. You can use third-party software to clone your old drive.
How to Change Boot Drive on Mac?
You can change the boot order on Mac from either the Startup disk utility or from the boot menu at startup. Using the boot menu comes in handy if you want to clean and install a new OS. But if you want to completely change to a new hard drive, using disk utility is preferable.
Using Startup Disk Utility
Using the Startup disk utility will permanently change the boot disk. To change it back, you will have to follow these steps again. Here’s how you do it:
Using Boot Menu
Using the boot menu will only change the boot device for only that one boot. If you restart your PC, the boot device will change back to the previous one. These steps will guide you on how to change the boot drive using the boot menu:
