Can't set active partition

Hi,

I had a dual boot manager (LILO) running fine on a partition which was
not my first partition and I installed Win XP on that first partition.
Now to be fair, the installation process asked my permission to take off
the "active partition" flag from the partition with "another operating
system" on it, which I accepted because it told me how to set it back
afterwards. Now XP is working fine, but I can't set the active partition
back to the one with LILO on it. I go into Computer Management - storage
- disk management and view the disks, but for the partition which needs
to be the active partition, the option "mark partition as active" is
greyed out.

The cynic in me is wondering if XP is "protecting me" from doing
something stupid, (like booting something not written by Microsoft!) but
I'm hoping there's a better answer than that. And yes, I am logged in as
an administrator. Is there a way I can do this, or do I need to find a
Linux boot CD and do it that way?

Thanks

Andy

Sorry guys, just for the hell of it I tried the command-line version of
the procedure (DISKPART) and after working out how to select which
physical disk I wanted (it's missing from the help, but is, fortunately,
fairly obvious) it let me set the partition with LILO on it as active.
It must be just a bug in the GUI version that the option is greyed out.

Thanks anyway.

Andy Civil wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I had a dual boot manager (LILO) running fine on a partition which was
> not my first partition and I installed Win XP on that first partition.
> Now to be fair, the installation process asked my permission to take off
> the "active partition" flag from the partition with "another operating
> system" on it, which I accepted because it told me how to set it back
> afterwards. Now XP is working fine, but I can't set the active partition
> back to the one with LILO on it. I go into Computer Management - storage
> - disk management and view the disks, but for the partition which needs
> to be the active partition, the option "mark partition as active" is
> greyed out.
>
> The cynic in me is wondering if XP is "protecting me" from doing
> something stupid, (like booting something not written by Microsoft!) but
> I'm hoping there's a better answer than that. And yes, I am logged in as
> an administrator. Is there a way I can do this, or do I need to find a
> Linux boot CD and do it that way?
>
> Thanks
>
> Andy
>