Active partitions in Windows 2000

[Guest]

Hi there

I marked 2 of my partitions active in Disk Management (The F:\ and G:\
drives). I'm worried now that I will not be able to restart my server - it's
a Windows 2000 Advanced Server, running Clustering services. The C:\ drive
remains as the System partition. I need also to delete one of these new
active partitions, but the option is greyed out (the G:\ drive) and also want
to set the F:\ drive so that it is not active. Is this possible?

Any help is appreciated.

Many thanks

Steven

 

[Jim Howes]

Hi there

I marked 2 of my partitions active in Disk Management (The F:\ and G:\
drives). I'm worried now that I will not be able to restart my server - it's
a Windows 2000 Advanced Server, running Clustering services. The C:\ drive
remains as the System partition. I need also to delete one of these new
active partitions, but the option is greyed out (the G:\ drive) and also want
to set the F:\ drive so that it is not active. Is this possible?

Are these different physical drives? If so, there is nothing to worry about (or
shouldn't be if your BIOS is playing the game by the normal rules)

The boot sector boot loader is a simple thing; all it does it look at the
partition table (which is embedded inside it, being in the boot block) and load
the sector that the first partition definition it finds that is marked 'active'
points at, and pass control to that, which ends up loading NTLDR, which ends up
loading several megs of other things, and you end up with windows.

All of this happens in the context of the disk that the BIOS thinks it is
booting from. So you typically have one active partition per disk. It doesn't
make those extra partitions bootable unless the boot loader knows how to look at
other disks, and the standard loader is not that clever.

If, for example, you were to install GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader), which as
you're running windows on your server seems extremely unlikely, you'd find that
the 'active' flag on partitions means nothing, because GRUB can navigate
filesystems, and boot specific kernel files, or launch bootloaders off other
devices.

In a pinch, you can set or clear the active flag using any partition editor that
can talk to your hardware (like a DOS boot disk, Win9x boot disk, linux
distribution, etc.). Note that the DOS/Win9x FDISK program will only allow you
to set one partition active, and may (?) only allow you to change the 'active'
flag on what it considers to be drive C:. Other partition editors may let you
do more (linux fdisk, for instance, will let you set all partitions active,
which is kind of meaningless)

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply Jim, much appreciated.

Yes, they are different logical drives. I've deleted one of the drives via
the HP Array Manager utilility and added it again, so it's fine. I will leave
the other one as active for the moment - what I was worried about that when
the server reboots it will try to boot off that drive, but like you say that
is not the case.

 

[Guest]

Sorry - meant to say different physical drives!!

Are these different physical drives? If so, there is nothing to worry about (or
shouldn't be if your BIOS is playing the game by the normal rules)

The boot sector boot loader is a simple thing; all it does it look at the
partition table (which is embedded inside it, being in the boot block) and load
the sector that the first partition definition it finds that is marked 'active'
points at, and pass control to that, which ends up loading NTLDR, which ends up
loading several megs of other things, and you end up with windows.

All of this happens in the context of the disk that the BIOS thinks it is
booting from. So you typically have one active partition per disk. It doesn't
make those extra partitions bootable unless the boot loader knows how to look at
other disks, and the standard loader is not that clever.

If, for example, you were to install GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader), which as
you're running windows on your server seems extremely unlikely, you'd find that
the 'active' flag on partitions means nothing, because GRUB can navigate
filesystems, and boot specific kernel files, or launch bootloaders off other
devices.

In a pinch, you can set or clear the active flag using any partition editor that
can talk to your hardware (like a DOS boot disk, Win9x boot disk, linux
distribution, etc.). Note that the DOS/Win9x FDISK program will only allow you
to set one partition active, and may (?) only allow you to change the 'active'
flag on what it considers to be drive C:. Other partition editors may let you
do more (linux fdisk, for instance, will let you set all partitions active,
which is kind of meaningless)