Why Do Dynamic Drives Have No "Active" Partition

[Will]

Why is it that with Dynamic boot volumes you cannot select a
specific partition and mark it as active? Boot.ini is NOT a
good substitute for marking the partition as active, which you
can do with a Basic partition. With Boot.ini, you end up
having two volumes marked as system or boot and it creates all
kinds of complex interdependencies between the volume used to
boot and the one that holds the active OS that are very difficult
to maintain and keep running. When you can mark a partition as
Active, that affects which volume is the boot volume and that
volume becomes self-contained.

 

[Guest]

Can you not set a dual boot system? i.e. 1 OS on 1 drive and another OS on
another drive?

 

[Will]

Yes, of course, but it is a lot less convenient, and it creates a hassle
when you need to grab files that were on the other devices.

I've also run into situations where after making a mirror of a bootable
device the mirror was not bootable. I end up having to hack the partition
table to mark the Dynamic drive as Basic. I then mark it as Active. I
then upgrade it to Dynamic. That almost always works, but if I could
simply select any partition of a Dynamic drive and mark it as Active all of
those very low-level, very dangerous steps would be avoided.

To me it seems like a simple design oversight to not allow this feature.