Active Drive

[JustUs]

For some unknown reason my external USB drive thinks it is Active - Disk
Management says so. I am unable to change it via WinXP. I tried
PartitionMagic and it won't let me either. What do I need to do?

Thanks in advance

 

[Andrew E.]

Try run,type:cmd In cmd typeiskPart In DiskPart,type:HELP A list of
disk cmds gets you going.

 

[JustUs]

Did that already. Nothing changes. Tried to set H to inactive - nothing
happened. Tried to set C: as active nothing there either.

 

[sgopus]

What's the problem?
is it trying to boot to the USB only? disconnect it and boot.

 

[JustUs]

Disconnecting really isn't a solution. There is a reason why I cannot remove
the active setting on the H drive. If disconnected the system boots from C: .
This has arisen out of NTLDR missing twice this week - and sure enough the
files needed in C: root are missing. Once copied back in the system functions
with no loss of data. I can only suppose that part of that error is being
caused from the H dirve being set active. I have run full AV and
Pest/Malware/Adware software and system is showing as clean. What I need a
solution in setting my H: drive as inactive - primary partition. I have tried
diskpart and unless I am not using it properly, it hasn't been able to change
H: either. Also, C: drive is active per PartitionMagic, but the System
notation is what shows - which is correct. H: active is the problem.

 

[Lil' Dave]

Whether a partition on an external USB drive is active or not should not be
an issue. The active bit, when set, is a cue for the mbr on that same hard
drive to point the handover from the bios what partition to boot from. The
ONLY time that would be an issue is if you set the bios to boot from USB
before that hard drive where XP is actually located.