Active Partition Inactive?

[Guest]

I've been trying to undo the Active Partition on one of my HHDs that I no
longer use as a clone to my C: drive. So far I've reformatted it but the
hidden partition remains.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[John]

I've been trying to undo the Active Partition on one of my HHDs that I no
longer use as a clone to my C: drive. So far I've reformatted it but the
hidden partition remains.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Its active, hidden or both? If its hidden XP probably can't do anything
with it. If its just active and you don't want it to be active XP
doesn't appear to be able to make it inactive using the GUI. XP's
command line 'diskpart' however may be able to do the job but a request
for info at the command prompt using 'diskpart /?' doesn't tell you
much. A 3rd party tool like Partition Magic wouldn't have a problem with
this and would be so much easier to use.

May I ask why its a problem? Every hard drive in your computer can have
an active partition with no ill effects. The BIOS is the ultimate
arbitrator at boot time.

John

 

[John]

Its active, hidden or both? If its hidden XP probably can't do anything
with it. If its just active and you don't want it to be active XP
doesn't appear to be able to make it inactive using the GUI. XP's
command line 'diskpart' however may be able to do the job but a request
for info at the command prompt using 'diskpart /?' doesn't tell you
much. A 3rd party tool like Partition Magic wouldn't have a problem with
this and would be so much easier to use.

May I ask why its a problem? Every hard drive in your computer can have
an active partition with no ill effects. The BIOS is the ultimate
arbitrator at boot time.

John

I forgot to mention two things.

1. If you have formatted it using XP then you need to assign a drive
letter for it to show up in Explorer. Perhaps that is all you really
need and you can use XP to do this: My Computer, Control Panel,
Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management.

2. If you really want it to be non-active even though it shouldn't
matter you will have to delete it first and then create it anew into the
same space on the drive.

John