Why activate a partition...??

R

Razmo

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 8, 2008
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Guys/Gals

Can anyone tell me the reason for activating a partition?

Thanks
Raz
 
I have 3 hard drives. One is my local (OS installed) and the other two are for running other programs and used for backup. Are you telling me the other two shouldn't be marked as Active?
 
Razmo said:
I have 3 hard drives. One is my local (OS installed) and the other two are for running other programs and used for backup. Are you telling me the other two shouldn't be marked as Active?
Click to expand...

It's per drive. If you only have one partition on a drive, it's usually marked active by defaullt. The BIOS will only look at the drives in the order it's told to for active partitions with an installed OS.
 
I suppose I'm looking to understand the need. Do you know whether there is an advantage/disadvantage activating partions on drives where no OS is installed?

Thanks man,
Raz
 
If you have 3 partitions on one drive, you can boot off any of the 3 partitions without a boot menu to select which one.
You do this by setting the partition you want to boot from as Active.

ie if you have 2 partitions and install windows...
Then you change the active partition, you will no longer be able to boot windows unless you install another boot system and Windows onto the new partition.

This has nothing to do with other drives, it is down to the drive you are looking at and which partition you want to be Active / Bootable.
 
Razmo said:
I suppose I'm looking to understand the need. Do you know whether there is an advantage/disadvantage activating partions on drives where no OS is installed?

Thanks man,
Raz
Click to expand...

No advantage or disadvantage. It's just a one byte flag in each primary partition entry the BIOS looks for on the boot drive that tells it "This is the partition to boot from".
 
Thanks guys

For some reason my Maxtor backup drive defautled to Active status. As this drive does not have an OS installed on it, intend to reformat the drive (need to anyhow) and leave the partition unactive.

Sounds as if the same goes for every drive that is piggy backing the primary (OS drive).

Raz
 
Razmo said:
Thanks guys

For some reason my Maxtor backup drive defautled to Active status. As this drive does not have an OS installed on it, intend to reformat the drive (need to anyhow) and leave the partition unactive.

Sounds as if the same goes for every drive that is piggy backing the primary (OS drive).

Raz
Click to expand...

That's normal, when it's the only partition on the drive Windows will make it active by default. It does not hurt anything at all.
 
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