Should I make C drive Active?

I cannot get my HP Compaq Presario CQ56 notebook to recover if I put it into sleep mode. I have tried a number of 'cures', non of which have worked. The latest 'solution' I have read is to go into Disk Management and make C: drive 'Active'. However, the process throws up dire warnings that, if I proceed it may make the notebook inoperable.
Apart from C: drive partition (297 GBs), which shows as "Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)", I also have a System partition (199 MBs) which shows as "Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)" and an HP Tools partition which I guess has no bearing on this inquiry.
Am I correct in assuming that the System partition contains the Operating System and not C: drive and this being the case I should definitely NOT make C: drive active? Very sorry if this is pretty basic to most.

Not likely you should make the C drive active.

Your system partition is active and that's fine.

Windows is on the C partition. The boot files for Windows are on the system partition.

Some machines do NOT have a system partition. In those cases, yes, the C drive should be marked active.

I know nothing about HP notebooks, but it appears the cause of your problem is not related to which partition is marked active. Look elsewhere.

Thanks I. My understanding is that there must be only one active partition which seems, in my case, to be the System partition. Should the active partition be the one with the boot files? If boot files are on the System partition why does the word 'boot' appear in the C partition brackets?

Yes, the active partition should contain the boot files. The active partition must be primary.

The "boot" flag simply means that the PC is now booted from that partition--not to be confused with the boot files location.

My C partition is flagged as "system, boot, page file, active, crash dump, primary partition". I do not have a separate "system" partition. My boot files are on C.

Your Sleep problem is probably not caused by System/Active partition, etc.
I would leave that as-is for now.

Did sleep/wakeup work before, and is this a recent problem ?

I recently had a wakeup problem on my PC where Sleep/Wakeup had been working reliably for 5+ years.
It started after one of the recent rounds of Windows Update.
I finally found how to fix it, by changing my NIC setting to not allow it to turn off to save power.

Here is a tutorial by Brink you can look through for ideas and things to look at:
Power Options and Sleep Mode Problems

pic of the setting i changed to fix my issue, and this setting was checked and working for 5+ years ...

Thanks all. At least I understand the message NOT to interfere with the partitions. I am not at all sure when sleep mode became comatose but it was some months ago when I first discovered the fault. Hibernation mode seems to work ok as far as I can tell, in that, the laptop powers off after about 30 seconds or so and when I switch back on it brings up 'Resume Windows'. I will now work my way through the tutorial.

Do you have Hybrid Sleep enabled in Power Options ?
Hybrid Sleep does a Sleep and a Hibernate when the PC sleeps, so if the power goes out it can Resume from Hibernate if it can't Wake from Sleep.
It's something easy to try if you don't have it enabled now.

Sleep stores the Windows session in RAM, and a small amount of power must be maintained to RAM while sleeping, or it can't wake from sleep.
Hibernate stores the Windows session to the HD/SSD and does not require any power to "preserve" the session saved to HD/SSD to be able to resume from hibernate.

Maybe there is a power issue when sleeping ?

Have enabled Hybrid sleep, both when running on battery and on power line, but it seems to make no difference. There may well be power issues because when I run energy reports I receive two two error notices relating to USB root hub and device which both say:
"The USB device did not enter the Suspend state. Processor power management may be prevented if a USB device does not enter the Suspend state when not in use".
I do not know if the USB problems are the source of sleep mode failure or the result of some other issue. The need to update the graphics driver is often quoted as a possible cause of sleep mode problems but I have let both Windows and the manufacturers website attempt to update the graphics driver. They both seem to conclude the driver is up-to-date.
I will work through the tutorial.