RE: How Do You Turn Drives/Partitions's "Active" Status On & Off?

Hello. I have a question. How do you turn off on a drive and/or partition its "active" settings? I do not see anything readily available in Windows Management within Windows 7. Am I missing something?

My situtation: At this time, I have 3 active partitions. I have 2 Windows operating systems installed (Windows 7 operating systems), each on their own hard drives (SATA) both set on the first partition of the many partitons on each hard drive. I know you have to have at least 1 drive/partition active on your computer, since it is the operating sytem I use. This would be the the first listed hard drive's operating system drive partiton would have to remain active. I can afford to turn off the second Windows 7 operating system's active status at the moment. I have another hard drive (EIDE) that I am using to save data on. It has 2 partititons on the hard drive and the first parititon is called "active". I need to turn this data partition active status off as well. What are the steps? Anything that can be used in Windows to do this? What are the steps please?

...and while I am at it, how about turning ON partitions as active as well (just the opposite)? I would have to know this for that second Windows 7's drive/partition.

Oh, there is no dual booting happening here between both Windoes 7s if you need to know that if that makes a difference. If it does, please tell me how it makes a difference?

Please reply ASAP.

Thank you!

 

The Active flag is set by the boot manager and should not be tampered with by users who do not fully understand the boot process. In a dual boot situation it is set by the user's choice of system to boot and the boot process uses it to pass control to the boot sector of the selected drive or partition.

Every connected drive will have an active partition, even when the drive does not contain an operating system, and it should be left that way.

 

Hello. I found the solution after some diligent work. It is rather simple and it will not cause any boot issues. I tested it on each partition and it worked great!

I will share this with you. If you have a dual boot, you'll have to split the operating systems apart FIRST.


Windows - How To Make Partition Not Active:

Open up a command prompt and type DISKPART.

Type LIST DISK
Type SELECT DISK n (where n is the number of the active disk you wish to make inactive)
Type LIST PARTITION
Type SELECT PARTITION n (where n is the number of the active partition you wish to make inactive)
Type INACTIVE
Type EXIT to exit DISKPART
Type EXIT again to exit the command prompt
Reboot

 

... and the purpose of doing this is ???????????