Active Partition in disk maintenance
I have a pc that dual boots Vista and XP. When I boot in XP, the F: drive is where windows is located. When I look at the Disk Management tool I see the C: drive (Vista) marked as "System" and F: marked as "Boot". I also have a USB drive (without an OS on it) that I inadvertently marked as "Active". So far there doesnt seem to be an issue with this, but there doesnt seem to be a way to unmark the partition as "Active" So my questions are a) what does it mean to set the partition active, b) how do I change the partition back to its non-Active state, and c) what's the downside to having the partition marked as active. Thanks for any help you can give me Dave1 person got this answerI do too
March 6th, 2010 7:55pm

I don’t think having an external disk labelled as Active will upset anything. Well it certainly didn’t when I was using HDD caddies with different versions of Windows in them. Here is the Disk Management Status in Vista and Windows 7, it‘s less defined in XP. The drive that is labelled as System and Active is where the boot files are stored for every Windows operating system that is installed. It is where the initial booting starts from and, as you're multi-booting, it produces a list of operating systems on the screen. The operating system you choose to boot to, will be labelled as Boot, Crash Dump and Page File, and is given the drive letter C, which is not necessarily the System/Active drive, i.e. you’re not necessarily booting to the leftmost partition in the Disk Management graphical display. Also, the Page File could have been disabled or moved to a different drive to, say, alleviate disk space problems.
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March 6th, 2010 10:14pm

Thanks Burr - I managed to remove the "Active" designation by using diskpart in command tool (select the disk, select the partition, then specify "inactive") It really doesnt seem to have any effect on the machine one way or the other. I did have a couple crashes when that external drive was unplugged or turned off with disk set Active that doesnt happen now that it is no longer Active, so maybe that was a side effect of the Active setting.Thanks again
March 6th, 2010 10:19pm

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