Jim, Do not change any settings, that may stop the system booting.
Regarding the Active partition: Only Primary partitions should be marked as Active. There should be 1, and only 1 Active partition on any drive that you will be booting from. there should never be more than 1 partition on a drive marked as Active. Note that is booting from, not running an OS from. When you start the system up, the BIOS looks at the indicated list of boot options/paths/devices/locations. If it is to boot from a PATA-hard drive it looks at the primary port of that controller for a drive with an Active partition. If it doesn't find one on the master drive it looks at the slave, then goes to the secondary port etc. down through the indicated list. The bios then, having selected an active partition loads information from the MBR of that drive into memory, and runs that as a program That program will then look for the boot loaded routines from that Active partition. In the case of windows XP that involves the boot.ini file (and others). If the boot.ini file indicates the user has a choice of OS, then the list is displayed for the indicated time. If no selection is made the default OS is loaded from the location indicated (a directory on any available device - Primary, or secondary partition, or CD/DVD type image - even USB connected devices.) Note that it is the OS that assigns letters to the various partitions So - you can see why I am curious as to how the system booted an OS without either partitions on the single drive being marked as being Active. JimB ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Poer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 8:05 PM Subject: Re: How to install slave drive > >C the OS partition is on the small drive that is master on IDE channel 0 > >port 0 partition 1 > >D is the system recovery partition on the small drive that is master on IDE > >channel 0 port 0 partition 2 > >E is the CD-ROM > >F the old OS partition on the large drive that is master on IDE channel 0 > >port 1 partition 1 > >G is on the small drive that is master on IDE channel 0 port 1 partition 2 > YES to all above as far as I can tell > Jim > >If neither of the partitions C or D are active, then the question is how > did > >the system boot with just this drive in the case > >is there a boot.ini file in the root directory of partition 1 on this > drive? > SO I'm confused now, shouldn't C be the active drive?? because it is > definately booting into the C drive which shows as the > Healthy(System) under Disk Management. What does active mean anyway? > > >F is active as it was OS partition, and the hardware will use it to boot IF > >the drive on port 0 is not bootable) > > Do I need to change any of these settings?? > Jim -- ---------------------------------------- WIN-HOME Archives: http://PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM/archives/WIN-HOME.html Contact the List Owner about anything: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Official Win-Home List Members Profiles Page http://www.besteffort.com/winhome/Profiles.html
