Backup Plan: When Do I Change Partition to Active?

[chinook9]

I would like to run a practice of a system restore to prepare for the event should my main SATA HDD fail.

I will restore the backup image of my system partition (C Drive) from an external USB drive to a primary partition on my second hard drive using UBCD4Win. I will use Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 and I'll probably also try Macrium Reflect Free.

XP Disk Management does not allow me to make the primary partition on the second hard drive active.

Can I make this partition active and leave it that way without causing problems? I can change the BIOS so this drive is not in the boot sequence.

Is it better to wait and make it active as part of the restore procedure?

Any help would be appreciated.

[MudCrab]

It shouldn't cause a problem to have the partition marked as Active. The Active setting just means that if that drive is booted and the MBR contains standard code, it will try to boot that partition. If the drive isn't booted, it means nothing.

I have an Active partition on one of my data drives. It contains my bootable recovery software files. To boot into it, I just select that drive from the BIOS boot menu. Otherwise, the main Windows drive boots.

[chinook9]

[quote=MudCrab]It shouldn't cause a problem to have the partition marked as Active. The Active setting just means that if that drive is booted and the MBR contains standard code, it will try to boot that partition. If the drive isn't booted, it means nothing.

I have an Active partition on one of my data drives. It contains my bootable recovery software files. To boot into it, I just select that drive from the BIOS boot menu. Otherwise, the main Windows drive boots.

Thank you for the response. I'll do a couple of tests in the next few days.