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active partition

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by hotrodgers

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how can i make a disk with ntfs or fat32 partition active? i have xcopied from an ntfs disk to another and when i switch the drives the pc will not boot up...i am sure cause no parttion active on the c drive..i tried using fdisk off a win98 boot disk, but that screwed up my boot with hardware drive configuration errors....how can i turn a drive in active that is formatted in ntfs and one that is formatted in fat32?
thanks

8 replies

by thechas

Sounds like there may be a BIOS overlay program on the hard drive such as Eazy BIOS.

fdisk should not disrupt your hardware if the drive is working properly, and the motherboard properly identifies the drive.

Your only other option would be a partition manager such as Partition Magic.

Chas

by thechas

You might also need to system the drive.
From a boot disk for the correct O and version, type sys c: from the command prompt.

Even though the files are there from the copying, the drive doesn't know it has the files without performing the sys command.

by erikbutler

you can set a patition to active in the FDISK program. However if the Master boot record is not on the new drive then it will not boot still.

by chris_beegle

You can use the recovery console. I believe it has an fdisk utility or one to set the partition.

You should have some fun with this one.
Just because you xcopied it doesn't mean that it is going to work. Did you include system and hidden files? The ARC path will be jacked and so will the registry that points to the drive # and partition #.

Be sure to type your boot.ini, it should have the same contents as the map arc from the recovery console.

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