I am confused which hard drive to set active in Windows 7

[Night_Hawk-19]

Here is where I am confused. I have my boot folder which tells windows where hard drive is to load windows 7. So my boot drive needs to be active status or does windows hard drive set to active or both. Windows is on C and boot is on drive G. Little confused. G also says system (probabily because has Boot Loader). I know how to set active and take active off. So question is both drives need to be active or just C drive?


I do underestand through other forums that boot loader is always on different drive than O/S.

 

[extide]

Setting a partition to active just says which partition to use when the system is booting from that disk. So you only need to set it on your boot drive, which is the one that is set as the boot drive in the bios. (Probably your G: )

You can only have one active partition per disk.

Also, you can have the boot loader on the same drive or on a different one, either way is possible.

 

[DeaconFrost]

I'm always confused as to these questions, so I'll ask an honest question. What are people doing that causes them to have to manually set a partition as active? I haven't had to do that since the days of booting Windows 3.1 from a DOS prompt.

 

[ambientZ]

I do underestand through other forums that boot loader is always on different drive than O/S.

I don't know about 'always'. Most computers only have one hard drive in them.

(And i disconnect any drive thats not supposed to be the boot drive when installing to keep shenanigans like this from happening).

 

[kinein]

So the fool-proof way is to always install your OS, with only one hard drive connected then you can forget about it?

Never had this problem so found this thread interesting.

 

[Kmical]

(And i disconnect any drive thats not supposed to be the boot drive when installing to keep shenanigans like this from happening).

This.

When I'm either installing the OS on a new hard drive, or re-installing on an existing drive ... I'll disconnect any other hard drives to avoid the boot drive being something other than the OS drive.

"Windows 7, you "smart" OS, I do not want my 2TB green drive as the boot drive, with the OS on my SSD!"

Also, AmbientZ, +1 for using the word "shenanigans" in place of the far-more-common four-letter "sh" word

 

[SRT8]

An active partition just means that it is flagged so the hardware can look for it as a boot device. It is a good practice to have one drive connected during a new installation to ensure you get the C: drive assigned to the new OS and that you don't have any other active partitions available to the computer while trying to do the installation. However, if you use the bios boot menu, you can always select the disk or device you would like to boot from.