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Active" status in Disk Management
"Waraf Nido" asked:
QUESTION Can some explain the Status data I see in XP's Disk Management . What is the "Active" status saying in my situation? ------ BACKGROUND I have several hard drives. On one of the hard drives I have a backup clone copy of my XP system partition. On the Disk Management console, XP lists this copy partition with a status of "Healthy (Active)". I understand "Active" to mean that the swap file is on that partition. But it is not. The Virtual Memory window in System Properties shows that only the system partition on C has any swap file on it. In fact, if I remove the hard drive with the "Active" partition on it then Xp boots just as before except this time it does not say any partiton is "Active". What is the "Active" status saying? By experimentation in the past, I've found that the "Active" partition is the partition where the master boot record (MBR)says the boot.ini file is, which in turn tells which partition to boot the system from. You can switch the partition in which the boot.ini file is read by merely changing the "Active" partition by way of the Disk Management utility. When you first clone a HD and tell it to copy the MBR as well, you're also telling the Destination HD to look at the same partition on *it* to find the system to boot as the Origin HD. You can reset this after the cloning by resetting which partition is the "Active" partition. You can tell by this, then, that you can put multiple clones of the 1st HD on your 2nd HD, and you can select which boots up by making sure that the boot.ini file on the "Active" partition has a pointer to the desired partition (i.e. the desired clone). At boot time, XP's multi-boot feature will ask which partition to boot, and you highlight the desired system (having names that you can supply in the boot.ini file) using the Up and Down arrows and then pressing Enter. You can always use the boot.ini file on the 1st HD if you include information in its entries saying which HD to look at for the system partition, or you can use a boot.ini file in the 2nd HD if you designate that HD as the higher priority device in the BIOS' boot sequence (i.e. the BIOS' boot priority list). Initially, of course, the 2nd HD will have a cloned boot.ini file that thinks it is in the 1st HD, so it will have to be adjusted accordingly if you have been using the boot.ini file in the 1st HD to select from system partitions that may have included some that were on the 2nd HD. *TimDaniels* |
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"Timothy Daniels" wrote:
"Waraf Nido" asked: What is the "Active" status saying? By experimentation in the past, I've found that the "Active" partition is the partition where the master boot record (MBR)says the boot.ini file is, which in turn tells which partition to boot the system from. You can switch the partition in which the boot.ini file is read by merely changing the "Active" partition by way of the Disk Management utility. When you first clone a HD and tell it to copy the MBR as well, you're also telling the Destination HD to look at the same partition on *it* to find the system to boot as the Origin HD. You can reset this after the cloning by resetting which partition is the "Active" partition. You can tell by this, then, that you can put multiple clones of the 1st HD on your 2nd HD, and you can select which boots up by making sure that the boot.ini file on the "Active" partition has a pointer to the desired partition (i.e. the desired clone). At boot time, XP's multi-boot feature will ask which partition to boot, and you highlight the desired system (having names that you can supply in the boot.ini file) using the Up and Down arrows and then pressing Enter. You can always use the boot.ini file on the 1st HD if you include information in its entries saying which HD to look at for the system partition, or you can use a boot.ini file in the 2nd HD if you designate that HD as the higher priority device in the BIOS' boot sequence (i.e. the BIOS' boot priority list). Initially, of course, the 2nd HD will have a cloned boot.ini file that thinks it is in the 1st HD, so it will have to be adjusted accordingly if you have been using the boot.ini file in the 1st HD to select from system partitions that may have included some that were on the 2nd HD. I should add that a bootable system must be in a Primary partition, and since the OS limits the number of Primary partitions to four, you can have only 4 bootable partitions (i.e. bootable clones) on a HD. *TimDaniels* |
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"Waraf Nido" wrote in message ...
QUESTION Can some explain the Status data I see in XP's Disk Management . What is the "Active" status saying in my situation? "Active" means the partition that BIOS uses to boot (in case more than one partition is bootable). That's all. --PA |
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"Waraf Nido" wrote in message
... QUESTION Can some explain the Status data I see in XP's Disk Management . What is the "Active" status saying in my situation? There are three values that can follow Healthy. Page File: obvious Active: partition marked bootable System: current OS volume If more than one apply, only the last in this list will appear. |
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"Pavel A." wrote:
"Waraf Nido" wrote: QUESTION Can some explain the Status data I see in XP's Disk Management . What is the "Active" status saying in my situation? "Active" means the partition that BIOS uses to boot (in case more than one partition is bootable). That's all. More specifically, the "Active" partition contains the boot.ini file which specifies the partition from which to load the system FOR THAT HARD DRIVE. This means that a partition on the 2nd HD can be "Active", but if the 1st HD is higher in the BIOS' boot sequence, the booted system will come from the partition that the boot.ini file in the 1st HD's "Active" partition designates. In the case of only one partition on a HD, that partition seems by default to be the "Active" partition. If the 2nd HD is made higher in the boot sequence, the "Active" partition on that HD will be used to supply the boot.ini file. This means that on the 2nd HD, partition 2 can be the "Active" partition, but the booted system can come from another partition if the boot.ini file in partition 2 designates that other partition. Keep in mind that the boot.ini file can designate a partition on ANY HD to be the one from which to load the system. Specifally, the boot.ini file in the "Active" partition on the 1st HD can designate a partition on the 2nd HD from which to load the system, and vice versa. BTW, the partition from which the system is loaded is called the "System" partition by Disk Management. *TimDaniels* |
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