Partition - Mark as Inactive

You're most welcome. :)

You're welcome Britton. Glad it could help. :)

Hello Bob,

A system image will include all of your system drives by default, and cannot be unchecked as you discovered. That's perfectly fine and what you would want since that is what you would at least want to be included in the image anyways.

If your D: drive is marked as a "system" drive, then it wouldn't matter if it was "active" or not, it would still be included in the image.

Sure, it's perfectly fine and welcomed to link our tutorials anywhere you like. I created them so that they may help folks no matter where. :)

Hi Brink, and thanks for your reply. Obviously I did some research about this drives-included-in-the-Image-list thing, and I was given to believe that the key to inclusion was the term "Active". I checked this - Computer/(right click)/Manage/Storage/Disk Management, and, indeed, both my C: and D: drives bear that term in their listing therein. No others do, and no others are included in the "Create System Image" list, so that seems to fit. Curiously, my C: drive does not contain the term, "System", while my D: drive does. My D: (XP) drive is not the important drive, and I truly do not want to Image it. I'm bothered only about having to reinstall Windows 7, and, all over again, the gigabytes of Updates that would subsequently follow - without a 2nd Service Pack, that is. I know that I will follow your tutorial sooner or later, regardless - I'm a fiddler, believing, "If it aint broke, mess about with it anyway."; I won't be able to ignore it now that I've read it.
I used the term "destructive" in the computer sense, meaning that the procedure rewrites or deletes or otherwise changes more than the contents of the single location that indicates "Active" or not active.
I'll let you know what happens.
Cheers.

Go ahead and post a screenshot of Disk Management showing the layout of your drives to see what we may be able to do. :)

Hidy. It only bloody worked ! After marking D: as Inactive it cleared the foul and wicked fixed tick in Create System Image. Good call. (Yes, I could've just disconnected the drive inside the case, and reconnected after doing the Image, but this is way more fun, ...and I thank you - sung to the tune of I thank you, Sam & Dave, decades ago. Youtube it.)
Just out of curiosity, I'm going to reboot without resetting the D: drive back to Active, and see what happens when I choose XP at startup - can't help it, I'm a fiddler. Later, though, got some fairly urgent stuff to do over the next coupla days. But I'll let you know.
Off Topic. Was thinking recently about the best innovations in computers in general. For me that's USB - just four cable connections and hot switchable, no more having to shutdown, connect, restart, and, with 7, one never seems to need a driver CD. Using the Command Prompt here reminded me that one of the best Windows innovations is the scrollable DOS window. Beats only having F1 to display the previous command - character by character.
No smiley of a happy bunny, sadly. But that's me now.
Took screenshots, but Insert Image wants a URL. There is no Browse (local disk) . Nturrh. Don't do cloud, cepn fer email.

I'm happy to hear that all is well so far Bob. :)