Yes, I understand, but for instance my other PC, it has only 2 drives C and D and neither is marked as active, only C drive is marked as System. Will I only see Active on systems with more than 2 drives? Since this PC has 2 identical OS's on it(one on Drive C and the other on Drive F), I do not know which it is operating from, so could I safely clean off Drive F? This is the same PC I installed the large drive into and all of a sudden was being asked to reactivate, so I took it out and wired it for a slave. Would that have affected the settings? Just for information the boot order is set to IDE CD-ROM, Diskette(A),USB Device,Hard Drive(C),Compaq Ethernet Controller. In that order. Jim
-----Original Message----- From: Windows Home/SOHO [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of James Button Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 4:27 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: How to install slave drive 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 -- ---------------------------------------- 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
