Curiosity - Active Partition

[BH2]

Hi guys,
I know,I should have not messed around with the disk management, but I kind
of did it by accident. What I did was to make two Partitions (separate
drives) Active, and the one with Xp on now not the boot partition. I know,
I know I shouldn't mess, but at least I have learnt something, my computer
would not boot, so what I did was to format one of the drives and install
windows xp on the now D drive. Before I did this I tried to make the C
drive the active partition thru Disk management but it would not let me.
Ok, now you know what a mess I made with my boot drive now D Drive, how do I
clear the mess up and get it back onto C drive. Any advice (other than
don't mess - I won't in future) will be really appreciated.,
Thanks and RegardBob

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi guys,
I know,I should have not messed around with the disk management, but I kind
of did it by accident. What I did was to make two Partitions (separate
drives) Active, and the one with Xp on now not the boot partition. I know,
I know I shouldn't mess, but at least I have learnt something, my computer
would not boot, so what I did was to format one of the drives and install
windows xp on the now D drive. Before I did this I tried to make the C
drive the active partition thru Disk management but it would not let me.
Ok, now you know what a mess I made with my boot drive now D Drive, how do I
clear the mess up and get it back onto C drive. Any advice (other than
don't mess - I won't in future) will be really appreciated.,
Thanks and RegardBob

You were probably unable to make drive C: active because
drive D: is active and this is where the system files reside.
Changing this would make Windows unbootable.

To get Windows to run off drive C: involves a complete
re-installation. At the very start you would have to delete
all existing partitions so that the installation process starts
with a clean slate.

If deleting all existing partitions is not an option then you
could do this:
1. Boot the machine with a Win98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com.
2. Run fdisk.exe and make the first partition active. This will
work for FAT32 and for NTFS partitions.
3. Reinstall Windows. Make sure it goes to drive C:.