Quite often, when installing Windows operating systems or when using them, serious errors occur due to the fact that the partition used for them is not active. What is activation, why is it needed and how to make the partition active, and we will discuss it further. The material below provides four main methods that even inexperienced users can use without any problems.
What does it mean to "make a partition active" and what is it for?
First of all, we note that every more or less competent user of a Windows-based computer or laptop should clearly understand that the section in which the operating system is installed or already installed, or rather, its primary bootloader, is active. When you first install Windows with the choice of the desired drive, which will act as the system partition, usually there are no problems, since all operations are as automated as possible. But when you try to install the second OS in a virtual partition or even on a removable drive in the form of a flash drive or memory card, from which you can boot if necessary bypassing the physical hard drive with the system partition, it is not so simple. Without activating the desired partition, it will not be recognized as the one on which there is a bootloader. The most unpleasant thing is that sometimes the activation of the system partition, as they say, crashes, and when loading a stationary computer terminal or laptop, a message is displayed stating that the installed operating system was not found.
Activation through Disk Management
Now let's see how to make a disk partition active, provided that it is not a system disk, and Windows boots without problems. In this case, you can use the built-in tool in the form of disk management, called from the "Run" console with the diskmgmt.msc command. Here the actions are quite simple.
Select the desired partition on the disk with the bootloader installed (usually it has the label “Reserved by the system”) and through RMB go to the activation point. After execution, the download problem should disappear.
How to make a partition active: command line
However, this technique is not applicable if it is impossible to start Windows itself. How to make the partition active in this case? To do this, you can use the boot from removable media (for example, from a recovery disk or media with the installation distribution), after the start, call the command line (most quickly this is done using the keyboard shortcut Shift + F10), and then apply its tools.
The list of commands to be entered (without punctuation at the end):
- diskpart
- list disk;
- sel disk 0;
- list part;
- sel part 1;
- active.
Pay attention to the section numbers. They must be entered according to the information obtained after the second command. You can determine the desired section by its size. In Windows of the seventh version, it usually has a size of 100 MB, in the eighth and tenth - about 350 MB.
Activating the selected section in third-party programs
If the above option does not suit you, say, because of the seeming complexity of the operations, you can use bootable media in the tools of which there are appropriate utilities (for example, Disk Director from Acronis or Partition Assistant from AOMEI). How to make a partition active with their help? By and large, all such programs do not differ much from each other, and their interface is very similar to the type of disk management section available in Windows. Only the names of the operations performed vary (and even then not very much).
Again, select the desired section and perform the activation. Only when using such utilities, you will need to press the application button from above, and then confirm the actions by clicking the "Go" or "Run" button (depending on the application selected).
Activating a section on a flash drive
To work with removable drives, you can advise another rather interesting utility called Bootice. It can be used both separately and in pair, for example, with the WinNTSetup program. In it, after starting the flash drive is automatically detected. How to make a partition active directly on a removable storage medium? In the program you need to click the “Parts Manage” button, then select the desired section and just click the activation button.
This utility is also notable for the fact that when you install Windows using the WinNTSetup program, which can signal problems with the partitions selected for loading and the main OS by displaying red or yellow indicators, it fixes errors elementarily. To do this, use the buttons to create (configure) boot records MBR and PBR.