C Drive Not Active After Cloning

I used ATI 10 to clone an image of my C drive to an external F drive. I missed the recommendation to disconnect the F drive after cloning for the first reboot.

At present Disk Management shows my C drive as System and my F drive as Active. I have not been able to figure out how to make my C drive active again. Does anyone know a solution to my problem?

Derek

 

Start > Run > (type) diskmgmt.msc > RClick partition > Make Partition Active

 

Ice Czar,

Unfortunately your suggestion will only work if I do not already have a drive that is active. Windows Disk Management will only allow one drive to be active. When I right click on the C drive the Make Partition Active command is greyed out.

Derek

 

a system partition is by definition active (sorry I missed that the first time )
its has to be a primary partition with the active flag, and and has the NTLDR (NT loader) and the boot.ini

Id suggest you enable booting to the USB via the BIOS and change the boot order (if thats your objective)

 

You can actually have one active partition (on a primary partition) for as many physical HDDs as you have
(becuase you control which HDD your going to look at via the BIOS)
I dynamically configure drives in my workstation and NAS all the time, Ive had up to 6 in one box
(actually it was 4 HDDs and 2 RAID arrays for a total of 12 HDDs that diskmgmt saw as only 6)
each could have had an active partition but the one Id actually used to load from would have been marked System and the partition whose OS install I was actually working from would have been marked either System if it was the same Id loaded from or Boot if not.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/struct_Partitions.htm
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/struct_Active.htm

in a dual boot senerio (which can be on one physical drive or more) your BIOS boot order selects which drive to look at for the Master Boot Record (MBR) which then employs the ntldr to start the boot, refers to the boot.ini and presents you with a choice of which OS install youd like to start, can be the same disk different partition or another disk and partition , if you boot to the partition that contains the ntldr & boot.ini it will be marked (System) in diskmgmt, if its a different partition from the System partition it would be marked (Boot)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_Startup_Process


if youd like you could edit your (current C drive) boot.ini to have the option boot to the USB drive
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022
or you could do the same the other way round, and have your BIOS point to the USB as the first HDD to look for a MBR and alter its boot.ini to provide the option to point back to the IDE\SATA

its can get a circular as youd like to make it
and is pretty damn flexible without having to resort to a boot manager provided they are all Windows installs

you can even boot to an extended partition with some tweaking
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/

 

Ice Czar,

Thanks for your lengthy feedback. I think I should reiterate my primary objective. I would like my C drive to be the only active drive. At present my external F drive which is a clone of the C drive is shown as active.

With my current arrangement my Windows XP based system will not boot up when the external F drive is connected. I have tried various ways of changing the active drive to C without success. When I run FDISK from a Windows '98 Floppy Boot Disk it only sees the floppy in the A drive.

Derek.

 

This is the real issue and doesnt directly have anything to do with the cloned drive being active, in fact it would be a poor "clone" if its not flagged active.
But I dont think its a "real clone".

This looks like a BIOS issue with your boot order
Im going to assume this is whats happening (since it fits the information I have)
the BIOS is set to allow USB to boot and the USB is higher than the IDE\SATA drive in the boot order so it looks that far only and stops,
further that the reason the USB drive wont actually boot, is because its not a true "clone" but rather a restore image.

If its just a restore image then your right it really doesnt need to be marked active
but you don't really need to fix that just disable booting to USB in the BIOS (unless you use flash drive utilities you boot to)
or just switch the boot order to look at the next drive in the list

would look something like this

FDD
CDROM
HDD 0
HDD 1

switch to
FDD
CDROM
HDD 1
HDD 0


a Win98 startup disk lacks the drivers to recognize a USB device
but if you really feel its necessary to change the active flag just download and burn the ultimate boot cd and see if Ranish Partition Manager or any of the other HDD utilities can see the USB
but really you dont need to, Im almost positive its the BIOS options boot order and Im 100% sure its not the active flag

alot of modern boards are set to boot to USB first since flash drives are being pushed to replace floppys

 

Ice Czar,

You were correct, it was a Bios priority problem. The external hard drive was a higher priority than the C drive. I changed the order as you suggested and I now boot up correctly with the external F drive attached.

I really appreciate your generous help.

Thanks,

Derek

 

happy to help

its well worth the time to understand both how drives get handled at a hardware level (Chipset level = IDE SATA, PCI slot orders PIRQ routing, SCSI and IDE RAID cards, USB drives and Flash Memory) and how they are controlled by the BIOS. As well as how multibooting works and what the operating system sees as hardware & partitions.


http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/res/index.htm
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/chip/index.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20040816113755/http://www.sudhian.com/showfaqs.cfm?fid=2&fcid=26 (PIRQ)
(of course its hard to find PIRQ tables for alot of consumer boards, while most any sever\workstation would have it in the manual)

it can give you ideas about how to employ what youve got to work with.