Comments on: How to set active partition in Vista and XP

By: alex

alex — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:24:10 +0000

thank you- that easy walkthrough saved me- was googling for an hour or so before i ound this… i had major trouble after running several hackintosh installations a linux and my main win7… my system changed drive etters from c: to e: anf made e: inactive… i was playing arount fixing boot ecords aso.. nothing helped- i could not get into win7 anymore- and im not at all unexperienced when it comes to system management.. well everyday you learn something new XD. thanks a loti hope posting this moves this thread up a few places in google… somebody else might find it as useful as i did) almost anywhere else you read just: well, you gotta rebuild your system from scratch… NO- YOU DO NOT- JUST ASSIGN ACTIVE STATUS TO THE PARTITION OF YOUR CHOICE…. THANKS AGAIN

By: Tarang

Tarang — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:58:35 +0000

Thanks Bro….It’s working
I have to active that partition to install vista.

THANKS VERY MUCH !!

By: antonio

antonio — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 05:11:57 +0000

hi,
i bought a compaq evo n1000c on ebay with windows xp, i’m tryng to set it up but when i turn the pc on the screen goes blank and gives me

BOOTORG
NO ACTIVE PARTITION

i’m going crazy and i dont know how to fix this, if anyone can help me i really approciate.
thanx

By: Bahman M

Bahman M — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:07:00 +0000

Very useful. Much appreciated.

By: Bedford

Bedford — Sat, 01 May 2010 20:51:31 +0000

Hi,
very usefull site. I changed the active partition of the main and unique OS disk to the one without OS and I can’t start anymore. The diskpart shipped with the XP install disk doesn’t allow to set the active partition, only create and format partitions.

So unfortunately this option doesn’t work.

By: john

john — Sat, 01 May 2010 15:13:34 +0000

Question. I have 3 hard drives in my PC, with the system on the C: drive and the other drives (D:, E:) are used for data storage. Using partition software, I noticed one of the storage hard drives is listed as ‘active’ and ‘primary’ (as well as the C: drive with the OS on it)….should that be changed to ‘non-active’ or ‘extended/logical’ drive? Notice, these are partitions, each of which, occupy the entire drives of 3 different hard drives.

By: road

road — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:40:53 +0000

Thanks! After a few hours of messing with fdisk and fixboot this finally worked! Great, clear and concise instructions.

I’m very grateful.

By: Oz

Oz — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:38:38 +0000

This was very helpful! I just installed another hard drive on my PC that already have Windows 7 installed on it. Wanted to set that as the active partition to boot between the two operating systems.

By: Phlip

Phlip — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:30:01 +0000

Thanks for this! Crazily, the Disk Management GUI won’t let you set partitions that Windows doesn’t recognise (say, a Linux partition) as active… happily, the CLI tool didn’t think it knew better than me, and let me do what I needed to do.

By: John

John — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:11:11 +0000

I also found that you can also set a partition inactive under diskpart.

By: CARLOS

CARLOS — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:14:33 +0000

Hello, I desperately need help! I have two partitions on my hard drive, one with Windows and one with Windows Vista. I didn’t know you could set more than one partition to active, which I did by mistake and now I get an error when I try to boot. I can only get into the BIOS. My email address is colordisco @ gmail .com. Thanks!

By: Carol

Carol — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 14:46:04 +0000

Thank you Lily-you were a life saver! Other post extremely appreciated.

By: Lily

Lily — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:26:12 +0000

Here is a free partitioning software that will help you to change the partition to active in one click:

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

By: Al

Al — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:00:55 +0000

Thanks SO much. This was exactly what I needed. I was
cloning a partially bad drive to a new one using xxcopy.
I also did FIXBOOT and FIXMBR (not really knowing what I was doing) and the new disk was still not recognized for booting. All it needed was to be declared ‘active’. A little prayer (ok, a big one) and your solution and viola!
Now my computer is booting off of the new disk!

By: Adrian

Adrian — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:29:23 +0000

Thank you. The cmd part I did not know.