Which partition should be marked as active

Was having several issues on the laptop, using Win 7 Home Prem., so we did a factory reset/restore, it seemed to have worked, however now when it is restarted it acts as if we just did the restore on it, when it restarts we get the message, "system is preparing computer for 1st use", I asked a friend he mentioned something about the partitions, after some searching, I found what he was talking about, now there are 2 partitions, the 1st is Healthy (Active, Recovery Partition) the 2nd, Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition), I guess my question is should the 2nd partition be marked active. and could this be the reason for the problem upon restarts, common sense would say it would be the 2nd, but I read a lot of posts where people have changed it and their computer fails to boot, and I don't like taking chances, any help would be appreciated.

Dell marks their Recovery partition Active so it an boot off the F12 and F11 keys at boot.

The Active partition should also be marked System which confirms it is booting the OS as intended.

If not try running Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times to see if there is anything to repair and if the System flag appears.

Since you are a tech enthusiast Look over these steps for doing the vastly superior Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 including the Special Note to Dell Owners at the end.

Ok, not to sound like a dumba@@, which one should be marked active.

Normally it's the Recovery partition, but is it also marked System now? This confirms it is booting Win7. If not run the Startup Repairs to see if it will start.

If you can't get it to boot correctly that way then move the Active flag to C and run 3 separate Startup Repairs again to see if it will move the System boot files to C and start.
Partition - Mark as Active

It's possible Recovery failed or is stuck in a loop, so you can also try running it again from the Recovery partition using the Dell F11 key. Otherwise you'll be better off doing the Clean Reisntall I wrote about earlier as it is a much better install.