Active or logical partition

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul
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Paul

If I'm setting up XP and Vista on separate drives for dual boot, do I make
both drives active? I've installed XP already and will be installing Vista
on the second hard drive but don't know if that second hard drive for Vista
should be set as active or logical.
 
I don't agree completely with the other answers you have gotten so far.
This part of your question "but don't know if that second hard drive for
Vista should be set as active or logical" indicates you don't quite
understand the terminology enough to understand partitioning.

At first it is kind of difficult to understand the difference between a
physical hard drive and the various uses for the word "drive" when talking
about drives. A drive letter never refers to the physical hard drive - it
always refers to a partition on a hard drive or memory card or thumb drive
or whatever.

A brand new hard drive typically has zeros in every byte of every sector.
Prior to using the drive, you must initialize and partition it (perhaps
partitioning is initializing - I'm not sure). Windows can do this from the
instalation CD/DVD or under disc management within windows XP or Vista.
Physical drives are not 'set active' -- 'active' is a property of a primary
partition. Only one Primary partition should be active at one time. The
active partition is the one that the system will try to boot from. Primary
partitions can be hidden or not hidden. For primary partitions, only
non-hidden ones are assigned drive letters. (If you have less than four
primary partitions, you can have one extended partition. That extended
partition can be chopped into many partitions.

Following is come info I copied from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/community/columns/inside/techan13.mspx?mfr=true
Most references to NT apply to WXP and Vista too.
<Quote>
Okay, let's do a short review. The Master Boot Record (MBR) on each hard
disk contains the Partition Table, and the computer uses the partition table
to determine how to access the disk. There is room in the partition table
for four entries, called (not surprisingly) partitions. A partition is a
portion of a hard disk that is set up to act like a separate physical hard
disk. A partition must be completely contained on one physical hard disk.
The MBR understands two types of partitions: primary and extended.
A primary partition is a portion of a physical hard disk marked as bootable
by NT, is formatted with a particular file system, and is assigned a drive
letter. With NT, there can be multiple partitions on a drive, of which one
at a time can be marked "active", meaning that you can boot from it.

An extended partition is effectively a logical disk and can be subdivided
into smaller logical drives. You can have only one extended partition per
hard disk.

The "System Partition" is the partition that contains the hardware specific
files used in loading and initializing the operating system. Only a primary
partition can be used as a system partition. Windows NT actually requires
that the system partition be a primary partition.

Then there's the Boot Partition. The boot partition is also used in starting
the operating system and contains the operating system files needed by the
OS. Both a primary partition and a logical drive in an extended partition
can be used as a boot partition.
</Quote>

Try skimming this URL and then read the parts that seem to apply to your
situation:

http://www.ata-atapi.com/hiwtab.htm

-Paul Randall
 
As you can glean from Paul's post, if you make it logical, you will never be
able to make it bootable when you decide to remove XP, you would have to
reinstall or continue to use the XP drive for your boot files. You should
make it primary and active.
 
Never expected to get so much info on this. Thanks to all.
I reinstalled Vista and other than some blue screen problems I'm working in,
it's just about complete
 
Hi, Paul.

Excellent post. One small quibble:
primary partitions, you can have one extended partition. That extended
partition can be chopped into many partitions.
Click to expand...

The extended partition can be chopped into many logical drives.

Each primary partition and each logical drive can be assigned a "drive"
letter and separately formatted. The extended partition does not get a
drive letter and cannot be formatted as a unit.

The TechNet article you quoted from is dated 1999, before Vista or WinXP or
even Win2K, but most of it is still applicable today. Just shows that a few
hours spent studying the basic structure of hard disks will continue to pay
dividends through several generations of Windows. ;<)

And to Paul Costanza, the OP, no matter how many Windows installations you
have, the boot process will always start in the System Partition (usually
the first primary partition on the first hard drive - but not always) and
then branch to the boot volume (primary partition or logical drive holding
the \Windows folder) for whichever Windows installation you select from the
opening menu - and that opening menu is one of the things store in the
System Partition. So I like to have a single primary partition on the first
HD to serve as the System Partition, plus multiple logical drives - on
multiple hard drives - to serve as boot volumes for my multiple operating
systems.

As some writers have commented, "Those not sophisticated about such matters
may think it strange that we boot from the system partition and keep our
operating system files in the boot volume." But that's the way it has
always been. You might want to check out this KB article:
Definitions for system volume and boot volume
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/314470/EN-US/

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta in Vista Ultimate x64)
 
Personally I don't agree with the definitions given in your link. Doesn't
agree with most of Microsoft published material.
for instance hardware-specific files that are needed to start Windows, such
as Ntldr, Boot.ini, and Ntdetect.com
should read software specific as this is for legacy nt booting OS's
(software) and has nothing to do with hardware.
 
Hi, John.

I agree with your disagreement. KB 314470 was rewritten just last month to
apply to Vista, as well as earlier Windows versions. I'll let them know
that it needs still another revision.

As you suggest, Vista does not require these 3 files at all unless it is
dual-booting WinXP/2K/NT as well. The names of those 3 files did not change
from WinNT4 (at least - that's where I started with NT) to WinXP, but the
content of NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM grew with each new version of the
operating system, partly because each version needed to know how to boot all
the predecessor versions. Even in the SP2 version of WinXP, those files are
larger and dated later than in the original WinXP. And the WinXP x64
versions are still larger; maybe that's what made the article writer think
that the files were "hardware-specific", since the x64 versions were larger
than the x86 versions.

For Vista, the files that must be in the Root of the System Partition are
bootmgr (no extension) and the \Boot folder.

Thanks for pointing out the error, John.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta in Vista Ultimate x64)
 
This is really strange. I have 3 drives on my system, and they all have an
active partition, and I boot to three different Operating Systems, with no
issues.
From Disk Management in Vista x64 which I am running at the moment.

Volume | Layout | Type | File System | Status
Simple Basic
Healthy (Active, Primary Partition) "Fedora 7 boot partiton" IDE 1
Simple Basic
Healthy (Primary Partition) "Fedora 7 System" IDE 1
Programs and Files (G:) Simple Basic NTFS Healthy (Logical
Drive) "Partitioned from XP Drive" Sata2
TRA (D:) Simple Basic CDFS Healthy
(Primary Partition) "DVD writer with dvd in it."
Vista 64 (C:) Simple Basic NTFS Healthy
(System, Boot, PageFile,Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) "Vista" Sata1
Win XP 32 bit (F:) Simple Basic NTFS Healthy
(Active, Primary Partition) Sata2

When XP is the OS, the drives look different
Win XP is C: ; Prog.... is Drive D: DVD writers are E and F, and the Vista
Drive becomes G:

So it looks like it is possible to have more than one Active partition on a
system.
 
Hi, Cesar.
So it looks like it is possible to have more than one Active partition on
a system.
Click to expand...

Yes. As John says, we can have one active partition on each physical hard
disk drive. I haven't run a non-Windows OS since trying OS/2 Warp when it
was new. But each of my 3 physical drives has a primary partition, and I've
installed Vista with each of them, in turn, serving as the boot device. So
now I can designate any one of them the current boot device and boot into
Vista. I consider that good insurance in case my current favorite drive
dies on me. And it has paid off in the past!

(Actually, I'm exaggerating a little. I have had such a complete
arrangement in the past, but I've been sloppy about updating it. At one
point during the Vista beta, I was multi-booting both 32-bit and 64-bit
versions of WinXP and of 3 Vista builds, eight operating systems at once.
And my hardware has evolved, too; currently I have 4 physical drives, but 2
are treated as a single RAID 1, so I have 3 active primary partitions.
Since installing Vista RTM on my new mobo/CPU last December, I've seldom
booted into anything else and I'm not sure I could right now. I need to do
some maintenance - but Vista is running so well that I keep putting it off.)

WLM messed up the formatting of your Disk Management details, of course, but
this is the key line:
Vista 64 (C:) Simple Basic NTFS Healthy
(System, Boot, PageFile,Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) "Vista"
Sata1
Click to expand...

When you are in Vista x64, this partition will be both the System Partition
and the Boot Volume, and Vista will see it as Drive C:. But if you reboot
from the same physical drive into WinXP, this same partition will still be
the System Partition, but it will not be the Boot Volume for WinXP, and it
might not be Drive C:. As you describe your system, you probably will
switch your BIOS (temporarily or semi-permanently) to boot from your SATA 2
when you want to run WinXP. In that case, the active primary partition on
SATA 2 will become the System Partition and WinXP's Boot Volume. Vista sees
that volume as Drive F:, but WinXP will see it as Drive C: - and WinXP has
assigned the first partition on SATA 1, which Vista sees as Drive C:, the
letter G:.

This multi-booting gets very exciting - and confusing. Especially when
there are multiple physical drives. Each physical drive can have up to 4
primary partitions, and any one of them at a time may be marked Active, and
a different one can be set active before the next reboot. Most users don't
know or care about all this. For those who do, the Disk Management Help
file has a lot of good information, but it is arranged as a reference, not a
text, so there's a lot of jumping around to find the information.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta in Vista Ultimate x64)
 
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