Solved What do Active, Primary and Logical mean when applied to Hard drives?

[Caramelo]

This screen shot shows what Macrium Reflect imaging program sees my drives as.

It shows D: on Disk 1 as active and G: on Disk 3 as active. What does this mean?

I assumed that I was booting from C:, which is my Win 7 drive.
Am I really booting from D:?

I believe D: is going bad physically. Norton Ghost says there are too many errors on it to make an image. If it goes bad, does it mean that I won't be able to boot my pc?

 

[alphanumeric]

Disk partitioning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[bigmck]

View attachment 174571

This screen shot shows what Macrium Reflect imaging program sees my drives as.

It shows D: on Disk 1 as active and G: on Disk 3 as active. What does this mean?

I assumed that I was booting from C:, which is my Win 7 drive.
Am I really booting from D:?

I believe D: is going bad physically. Norton Ghost says there are too many errors on it to make an image. If it goes bad, does it mean that I won't be able to boot my pc?

One thing you need to be aware of concering Macrium is that the drive letters and the drive names do not match as a rule. If your C: drive is called Main, when restoring from Macrium it might show D: as Main. You need to disregard the letters and go strickly by the name you have assigned to your drives.

 

[seavixen32]

Can you give us a screenshot of Windows 7's expanded disk management window?

We need to know your disk layout i.e. which are physical hard drives and which are partitions on a hard drive.

You should no more than one active partition on each hard drive as Windows looks for it when it boots up. Generally speaking the active partition is normlly the one that holds the boot information at the start of the drive, but some people prefer to dispense with the system boot partition and use the Windows partition instead i.e. the Windows partition is the active one.

You can have three primary partitions plus one simple extended partition on each hard drive. The extended partition can be used to create further logical partitions should you need them.

 

[Caramelo]

Seavixen, can you give me the steps to get to the windows expanded disk management window please?

 

[whs]

Looks like your bootmgr ended up on D - that is what "active" means. That is not really a problem as long as you do not reformat D. But if you do, you will not be able to boot any more.

This kind of funny configuration happens very often. The Win7 installer grabs the first partition of the first drive it can find to place the bootmgr (and if none is present, it creates the little 100MB partition). That is why we always recommend to disconnect all drives except the one where you wish to install Win7. Once done with the installation, you reconnect them.

 

[seavixen32]

Seavixen, can you give me the steps to get to the windows expanded disk management window please?

Navigate to Start>Control Panel>System & Security>Create and format hard disk partitions.

See screenshot below:

 

[Caramelo]

As you can see Disk 1 (Drive D) is not showing now in disk management. It has done this before and it may have failed for the last time. I can still boot up to win 7 however.

@whs, yes I got this configuration when I built the computer. Out of lack of knowledge I just threw in two drives from my previous pc and two new ones, wired them all up and booted up. I installed win 7 at a later point.

How can I make the Win 7 hd the active or boot one?

 

[seavixen32]

"How can I make the Win 7 hd the active or boot one?"

Just right-click the partition and choose Mark partition as active.

 

[whs]

No wonder disk0 and disk1 do not show.

Correction: You have to move this guy "UP" - not "DOWN".

 

[theog]

Disk0 & Disk1 should still show on top view.

 

[Caramelo]

"How can I make the Win 7 hd the active or boot one?"

Just right-click the partition and choose Mark partition as active.

Will that allow me to boot from the win 7 hd? I'm concerned that if D dies I will not be able to boot up.

 

[seavixen32]

"How can I make the Win 7 hd the active or boot one?"

Just right-click the partition and choose Mark partition as active.

Will that allow me to boot from the win 7 hd? I'm concerned that if D dies I will not be able to boot up.

If that happens you can always run a startup repair to fix the master boot record.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html

You would need to run it three times.

 

[Caramelo]

No wonder disk0 and disk1 do not show.

Correction: You have to move this guy "UP" - not "DOWN".

This is all I get when I go to the expanded disk management screen. I used to have a disk 1 showing. I do have 4 physical disks in my pc plus the external hd (J). D or 1 is no longer showing up because it is failing. You can see D (labeled Old XP) in my first ss at the top of the page.

You can see disk 1 displayed in this ss



Unfortunately I don't think I can access it any longer.

 

[theog]

What do you have connected to the first two Sata Ports?

 

[Caramelo]

"How can I make the Win 7 hd the active or boot one?"

Just right-click the partition and choose Mark partition as active.

Will that allow me to boot from the win 7 hd? I'm concerned that if D dies I will not be able to boot up.

If that happens you can always run a startup repair to fix the master boot record.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html

You would need to run it three times.

I've noticed that if I unplug the power from D to stop it from making noise, I can't boot the pc. I did use a utility to save a copy of the MBR from the win 7 hd but your method sounds more thorough.

 

[theog]

Physically disconnect the ALL the HD.
Make the Win dows 7 HD, disk0 & first HD boot in BIOS. (& frist Sata port on the MOBO.)
Make sure C: is master.

Follow this base tutorial:
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...-me-get-windows-7-boot-again.html#post1518114

 

[Caramelo]

What do you have connected to the first two Sata Ports?

Disk 2 and 3 are connect to sata the other 2 drives are ata I believe. They are not sata drives.

 

[Caramelo]

Physically disconnect the ALL the HD.
Make the Win dows 7 HD, disk0 & first HD boot in BIOS. & frist Sata port on the MOBO.

Follow this base tutorial:
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...-me-get-windows-7-boot-again.html#post1518114

How do I tell which physical disk in the machine is the one containing the win 7 so that I can make sure it's connected to the first sata port?

When you say physically disconnect the drives, do you mean all cables, power as well as data cables?

 

[theog]

What do you have connected to the first two Sata Ports?

Disk 2 and 3 are connect to sata the other 2 drives are ata I believe. They are not sata drives.

Physically disconnect the ALL the HD.
Make the Win dows 7 HD, disk0 & first HD boot in BIOS. (& frist Sata port on the MOBO.)
Make sure C: is master.

Follow this base tutorial:
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...-me-get-windows-7-boot-again.html#post1518114

You say, your C: Drive is IDE. (PATA)

EDIT: Miss read.

C: HD is SATA, the MOBO SATA port are marked 1,2,3,4. Some MOBO start with a SATA port 0.