New Seagate External Hard Drive Marked "Active"

Urthboundmisfit · 31 Aug 2014

Hello 7Forums Guru's. I've never used external media and am trying to decide on a partition scheme for data storage (ISO's, music, pictures about 100-150 gb) and to store weekly backups, system image etc) but before I even start on that end, should my external HDD (Seagate Backup Plus 1 TB) be set to active? The drive was completely plug & play and showed up in Disk Management as "Active"

Please advise this relative n00b.

Attachment 331314

jumanji · 31 Aug 2014

Only a partition from which one boots needs to be active and going by this dictum there is absolutely no need for a partition on an external drive to be active. Though an active partition on an external drive should not matter it is always safe to have only the booting Partition as active.

You can turn a partition active or inactive using diskpart.

Start > All Programs > Accessories > Right click on Command Prompt and Run as administrator.

Then:

New Seagate External Hard Drive Marked "Active"-31-08-2014-12-05-44.jpg

Be sure to select the correct external disk and partition.

Urthboundmisfit · 31 Aug 2014

Thank you for the reply and confirming, I thought as much.