Re: Diskeeper, Acronis and NTDLR

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:41:13 +0000, Nigel Wade <nmw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:40:06 +0000, Nigel Wade <nmw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

You need a tool which can modify the partition table. Fixmbr, fixboot won't do
that. AFAIK Windows fdisk can only be used to mark a partition as active, but
not remove the active status.

It's hand-holding enough that if you mark one partition as active, any
other active flags get cleared.


But does it clear all other active partitions on all drives?

Nope. But that doesn't matter. The BIOS looks at the device it has set
to boot from, and if it has a boot record hand over to that. The
standard boot record on a hard drive can check for Active flags *only*
on the local drive, and hands over control to the boot code on the
active partition, which then finally gets around to bringing up the
OS.

If the OS is so confused that it has trouble with two drives having
boot records, that's something I've never seen - and I spent from 1991
to about 2006 with multiple disks with active flags in my machines for
multibooting purposes. By chance I was doing the same again today, not
a problem at all.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the
same good things for the first time several times. -- Nietzsche
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Dual boot help please (Doing it right?).
    ... Disk 1 Partition 1= F: (Secondary WindowsXP Pro install) ... Pluged power to all drives and rebooted. ... FIXMBR is used to repair the Master Boot Record of a harddisk. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Changing Windows XP Boot Partition
    ... went to the drive management option but the 'Mark as Active' option was ... > 4 Make note of the number of the partition that you want to mark as ... > activeOn basic disks, marks the partition with focus as active. ... >> drives back over? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Permissions for mounted NTFS drive
    ... On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 16:56, Mark Knights wrote: ... > access to the drives. ... I would recommend NOT having write access to an NTFS ... partition from linux. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Partitioning hard drive
    ... Mark M. wrote: ... >always partitioned it into 2 drives, one for the operating system and ... I am firmly in favour of keeping the system on a separate partition from ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Re-install XP
    ... Setup seems to want to repartition ... Mark L. Ferguson ... has a recently formatted partition ... I have tried my windows disk in both my optical drives ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)