Can TI Home (Ver 10) create a NON active primary partition?

I had to replace my second HD which held data in one partition and backups of another HD in a second partition. These partitions had been flagged by Windows as Primary and Logical respectively; neither partition was Active.
Using an image file of the whole disk I restored both partitions onto a new drive. I couldn’t find a way to create the first partition as Primary without also making it Active.
Did I miss something?

 

I think you are correct. However, I don't think it matters. Having an Active partition on the drive means nothing (as far as I know) unless you make that drive the boot drive in BIOS or by setting the jumper to Master on the first IDE channel on older machines.

I have a machine set up with two internal hard drives and additional drives that are in a drawer. Each drive has a Primary partition set to Active. I select the boot drive in BIOS, and boot to any one of the drives without problems with Windows 98SE, XP and Vista.

 

Yes – because of past HD replacements, cabling issues, yada yada yada … this disk was the first HD in the boot chain. I had to change the BIOS and then run DISKPART to remove the Active state. Seems to be a PITA that wasn’t necessary if TI would let you create a non-active primary partition, especially since that was what the HD had to begin with when TI backed it up.

 

I agree. It's the Microsoft default situation.

 

The drive in question was the Slave on the secondary IDE channel. It was also the first HD in the BIOS boot order. When TI insisted on making it Active, the PC would not boot after the drive was restored.
Prior to TI restore – all was good.
After TI restore –not so good. That just shouldn’t happen IMHO.
My only other TI choice was to make the partition Logical. But the PC wouldn't boot then either.

 

Hello TheWeaz,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Backup software.

Please note that if you choose to restore just one partition not the entire disk, you will be able to choose whether to restore mentioned partition as logical, primary or active. In some cases some options can be grayed out, for example when you restore your system partition (one where Operating System is installed), it is to be Active, so the program will not let you to restore it as a Primary.

Thank you
--
Nikita Sakharov

 

Nikita,
Thanks for the reply.
I chose one partition. It was not the system partition and had no OS on it. The system (active) partition doesn’t even reside on the HD from which the backup was created. Primary was grayed out. Only choices were Active or Logical (which didn’t seem to work).

 

Acronis does like to make an active partition on every drive it works on. Disk Director also does this. I find it very annoying. I think I've even seen DD change a partition from non active to active just by changing the size of the partition. Most of the time it does not cause any problems. You found a situation where it did cause a problem. I don't see any good reason for having an active partition on a second or third hard drive used for data storage. I've seem systems where the BIOS gets confused and wrongly changes the boot order when drives are changed or swapped.

I even asked Acronis to just add a menu item to DD to allow for changing an active partition to non active. (Paragon's Partition Manager and Hard Disk Manager have this feature.) At least that way it would be easy to change the flag back to the way it should be. They told me they didn't see a need for this.

 

“I've seem systems where the BIOS gets confused and wrongly changes the boot order when drives are changed or swapped.”

Although I didn’t mention it earlier, I can’t for the life of me figure out how the Slave drive got bumped up above the Master in the BIOS boot order.

“They told me they didn't see a need for this.”

Same response I give for “upgrading” to Version 11.

 

I wish I had a quarter for every time I've responded to someone on the Disk Director forum who wanted to clear the active flag on a partition. The only way to do this with Disk Director is to use the disk editor, view sector 0 "as partition table" and then there are checkboxes for setting or clearing the active flag on each partition table slot. That's an awkward and non-intuitive way to do what should be very simple. I second your recommendation to have this added to the menu. Lots of people ask about it.

 

I can remember partitioning drives with FDISK and forgetting to set the boot partition active. It was always a surprise when the system wouldn't boot - followed by an "Oh heavens to Betsy, I forgot to set the partition active again."

Acronis has solved this problem. Now, it's idiot proof. However, there's a price for idiot proofing and that's loss of flexibility.

 

You couldn't boot because a partition was not made Active; I couldn't boot because TI forced me to make a partition Active.