Windows 7 - Is it possible to set an active partition on USB flash?

Hi all,

Just a quick one, i have a 2gb usb flash pen, bascially what i am tryng to do is create a small active partition on it so i can copy my Active Boot files over and boot from the drive. Really want to give this application a try heard good things about it. I just cant seem to find a way to set an active partition or if its even possible?

any ideas?

Thanks a mill

The Active Boot tool should make your USB flash drive bootable for you. I haven't had to manually set a partition as active in well over a decade, and that was on an ancient (at the time) DOS system.

If you just want a bootable usb drive, theres a very standard, boring way of going about it.

MS-DOS Bootable Flash Drive - Create

Thanks for the replys guys, i dont really want to make the whole usb stick a bootable drive as the Active Boot program files are only 140mb so that why i would like to create 1 small active partition and then i can still use the rest of the drive for storage.

Dont really want to waste 2gb of space for the sake of a 140mb

Even if you make the drive bootable, you can use it for storage. You dont need to boot from the drive every time, only when you need to.

All your really have to do is make the entire USB drive bootable, then simply set the hidden attribute for those 140mb of files.

That what I did on my 16GB drive. I made it bootable as an Acronis True Image Home Boot Drive. I copied my backup image to the drive, and the remaining 7 or so was used for normal purposes after hiding all relevant Acronis files to prevent them from being accidentally deleted...

Sounds like a great idea cant believe i didnt think of that lol! Have you ever used active boot before? I always use macrium to create and restore images but like to try new things every now and then. I heard this has a HD health checker built in as well which is something i have been looking for for a while now

The boot files will be hidden automatically, you dont need to do anything if you use that tut i linked.

Have you considered looking for free alternatives? Active Boot seems a bit expensive for what it does.

Can't say that I have.

The only disk HD Health checker that I use is SeaTools from Seagate., but that's also only because I only use Seagate hard disks, and won't need anything else.

Yes, the actual boot files are hidden, but as is the case with the Acronis Boot Media, there are some files that are not hidden, in particular the "Recovery Manager" software itself that is loaded by the "boot sector".

I guessed that perhaps the "Active Boot" software mentined by craney5 might be the same and have a few folders that are not hidden...