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Making a drive partition inactive.

Q

QUOTH

Senior member
Hello, I've just reinstalled vista 32bit home premium and all my drives letters changed around. I formatted the C drive and reinstalled so vista is on C. No problems there.

I have accidentally made another partition [full of files] active. I need to change this drive's letter but when I try in the disk management snap in I get a message saying "You may not change the drive letter. This may be because it's a system or boot volume or has page files".

I'm assuming the problem is just that i accidentally clicked "make partition active" [it's 4am, i screwed up].

Is this the problem? If so how do i fix it? Thanks all.


And to make things clear this partition is full of files so I can't delete and remake it and I do NOT have an OS installed on here, NOR do I plan to install an OS on here. there are no programs installed on there.
 
Do you have any programs installed there (i.e. is there a "Program Files" directory)? AFAIK Windows won't allow you to change the drive letter if programs are installed there.
 
Can you just use Disk Management to make the NEW C: drive Active? I get the impression that making one partition active in Vista will make the other one Inactive, since there's no "Make Inactive" choice ("Make Active" just greys out if a partition is already Active) and since you can only have one Active partition in the OS.
 
ha, that was easy. But it has not solved my problem. The problem partition is also listed as the "system" partition. How do I make C the system partition again?

Note: I have restarted the PC many times since making this mistake and it starts up fine, no problems there.
 
I don't know if this article is 100% accurate, but may give you a starting place.

Determining if a drive is a System Drive.

"A drive is a system drive if it holds any of the following:

* A folder used by Windows such as "Windows", "Desktop", "My Documents", etc.
* The "Temp" and "Tmp" folders used by many programs as a temporary storage area. To display their location in Windows XP click Start, Control Panel, System, Advanced, Environment Variables.
* A cache folder used by Internet Explorer or other browsers. To display its location in Internet Explorer, click Tools, Internet Options, Settings (in Temporary Internet Files).
* A page file. In Windows XP click Start, Control Panel, System, Advanced (tab), Settings (in Performance), Advanced (tab), Change (in Virtual Memory)."
 
EDIT: I sort of found a solution.

I enabled see system files [control panel, folder options] and opened up the partition I'm having trouble with.

There I found a "hidden" folder called boot. It's the same as the one on C. Windows won't let me delete or move it. I believe this was accidentaly created when I made this partition active.

Even though I couldn't delete the contents the problem is now solved and the C partition is the system partition.

so yay, all fixed.
 
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