Healthy (Active) HDD...

[Xaneden]

Hey Guys,
Today I plugged in my external HDD, and realised it had changed back to the default drive letter of E. I therefore went into the Administrative Tools, Computer Management, and then clicked Disk management. I selected the drive in the list, and right clicked and meant to click 'Change Drive Letter and Paths', but accidentally selected 'Make Partition as Active'.

Now under status, in the same list, the drive is marked as Health (Active). What does this do? And how do I change it back? The option is greyed out when I right click now.

Thanks for any help you guys can give.

[Xaneden]

Ok thanks Pyle.

[mike_w]

I think the active partition is the partition that is booted off for each hard drive. If it just an external hard drive, it shouldn't be a problem, but if you have two or more partitions on a hard drive, and make the wrong one active, you won't be able to boot from that drive because it'll be looking in the wrong place for the bootloader (or whatever it is called).

[DaveBG]

If you make more partitions on this drive (primary) you will be able to select them as active and it will change as you want it. This is not a big problem, stay cool!

[bobo007]

You should still be able to change the drive letter ?

[Drago]

You should still be able to change the drive letter ?

Are you sure? I don't think so... I can't test it at the moment, but I thought, that you can't change the drive letter of the active partition and the drive letter where you got installed your OS.

@ mike_w: You are right... Active means, that it's the partition, where the boot files are on it and - I think - it's also an information in the MBR, which points to the current active partition.

[bobo007]

The OS drive is shown as (system) in disk manager.
And your right, you can't change the drive letter for the OS partition.
But you should still be able to change the drive letter of an (active) partition.

[Xaneden]

Well I just reinstalled Windows, and it set the drive as 'F:'. I checked Computer Management, and it is still classed as Active, but I had no problems changing it to 'X:'.

[Drago]

Well I just reinstalled Windows, and it set the drive as 'F:'. I checked Computer Management, and it is still classed as Active, but I had no problems changing it to 'X:'.

Wow, I didn't know, that you are able to change the active partition's drive letter. Thx for the information...

And: For sure the drive letter (after the install) is still active... To avoid such behavior you had to change the active partition before the installation.

Any OS has to install the boot files on the active partition... A new installation doesn't matter...

[Xaneden]

I had to reinstall Windows anyway (I got myself a keylogger that Norton had a breakdown over...). But anyway, luckily for me the 'Active' state hasn't seemed to have done anything bad to the drive and my precious data.

Thanks for your help guys.