My system seems to have a strange behavior. Plugging in a formatted or even a "foreign" disk sometimes causes it to go into a boot/reboot loop, where Windows 8 briefly shows a message "Preparing for Automatic Repair", then just goes right back to rebooting.
The first time it happened was just after I formatted my HDD with the Windows 8 disk management service. I decided to see what Acronis Disk Director 11 could tell me about the disk, so I booted from my Acronis boot disk. The HDD was in MBR. I converted it to GPT, then redefined all of the HDD partitions. This time, Windows 8 booted correctly.
The second time the "endless boot loop" happened was when I plugged in my old Windows 7 production HDD to copy some of the contents to the new one. The 7 HDD is MBR, (and should remain so...and I don't think this is an MBR vs. GPT issue anyhow), so I decided just for fun to see if I could boot Windows 8 without the old HDD, then hot-swap it in. I had to go into the BIOS and turn on hot-swap for that SATA port, but sure enough it worked!
I am concerned about how much trouble it's going to be when I need to add or remove drives down the road. But for now...it's going okay.
One other weird thing was when I woke up, the PC had gone to sleep. Upon waking it, I was presented with a screen that said that Windows was unable to authorize itself, but there was a button "authorize", so I clicked it. It confirmed success. That was odd because I had been using it for hour before that and was always connected to the internet.
Well, onward and upward. Back to copying data...