Making a partition inactive ?

[Steve]

Just installed a second hardrive (secondhand) and its previously had an OS
installed on its first partition. In Computer Management its showing up as
an active partition which means I cant format it or delete the old OS. (Am
I right in thinking that only the C: partition on Disk 1 needs to be
active?). How can I change Disk 2 to make it inactive?

 

[NotMe]

Unless it is trying to boot from that disk/partition, I wouldn't mess with
it.

 

[Steve]

Hmm... Yeah.. thats what my instincts are telling me aswell.

Its just that I'm recycling an old HD as my main ones full (and I'm skint).
Being active means that I can only use 30 gig of a 40 gig drive as I cant
delete a lot of old system files and stuff from it. Thanks for the advice
tho'... I'll certainly take heed unless someone comes up with another way
round it

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Just installed a second hardrive (secondhand) and its previously had an OS
installed on its first partition. In Computer Management its showing up as
an active partition which means I cant format it or delete the old OS. (Am
I right in thinking that only the C: partition on Disk 1 needs to be
active?). How can I change Disk 2 to make it inactive?

Only the partition that does the loading (i.e. that contains the ntldr,
boot.ini, and ntdetect.com files) needs to be marked "active". The
OS itself can be in another partition (even in an extended partition)
on another hard drive. What makes you think you can't remove the
"active" flag? Have you run Disk Management from an OS on
another partition?

*TimDaniels*

 

[ByTor]

Hmm... Yeah.. thats what my instincts are telling me aswell.

Its just that I'm recycling an old HD as my main ones full (and I'm skint).
Being active means that I can only use 30 gig of a 40 gig drive as I cant
delete a lot of old system files and stuff from it. Thanks for the advice
tho'... I'll certainly take heed unless someone comes up with another way
round it

If you want to delete it as you said you tried, and don't care what's on
it, than find out what kind of drive it is, download the manufacturer
utility disk and use that to wipe it clean and re-format it..........

 

[Mikhail Zhilin]

Hmm... Yeah.. thats what my instincts are telling me aswell.

Its just that I'm recycling an old HD as my main ones full (and I'm skint).
Being active means that I can only use 30 gig of a 40 gig drive as I cant
delete a lot of old system files and stuff from it.

But why you think so? The "Active" flag means no more that you CAN boot from
this drive -- but only if some other conditions are holding true.

And you can delete ALL from this secondary drive, or format it (the "Active"
flag won't be reset while formatting though) with no problems, as if this flag
is not present.

--
Mikhail Zhilin
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
http://www.aha.ru/~mwz
Sorry, no technical support by e-mail.
Please reply to the newsgroups only.
======

 

[Lil' Dave]

Easiest way is to remove the partition in disk management, then create a new
one. If you never want to mess with this again, create a logical partition
in an extended partition area. An extended partition cannot be active in an
MS operating system.

Or just leave it alone. You should be able to format it if its not being
used by your current XP for operation.

A used hard drive, I would write zeroes to it using the hard drive
manufactures utility first. Takes a few hours or more. Eradicates any
possible virus. Then create a/some new partition(s).

 

[Timothy Daniels]

An extended partition cannot be active in an
MS operating system.

I have, on a hard disk running Windows XP Pro,
an Extended partition marked "active" as reported by
Disk Management. It was set this way by a cloning
utility which somehow thought I wanted an Extended
partition to be created to house the clone. A Primary
partition on the hard drive is also marked "active", and
that is the partition that gets control from the MBR, so
the "active" flag is apparently ignored by the MBR for
Extended partitions and so it causes no problems. But...
the Extended partition is still marked "active" (and I can't
change the setting).

*TimDaniels*

 

[Lil' Dave]

That's odd. How would the PC know which logical drive to access if you had
more than one?