Making a partition active

[BoboKatt]

Greetings all..

I just finised installing WinXp PRO on my new SATA drive but after the files have finished installing on my drive and the system reboots it tells me I have an invalid OS no matter what I do. When I bought the SATA drive I had attached it to my system that already had WinXp PRO installed on my IDE drive. Since this drive is much faster (raptor) I wanted to do a fresh install of windows... anyhow I unpluged the IDE drive to not have any confusion but when I had originally hooked up the SATA drive I had just formated it in Windows XP (the quick format) and started using it. I used NTFS. My question is that always way back when, I would use a floppy to Fdisk the new drive and partition it and make a partition active. I never did this with this drive.... and WindowsXp never asked me during the installation though it recognized the drive just fine. It was just after the copying of all the files that it crapped.

First of all now that the drive is formated in NTFS can I even use my old floppy with FDISK and should i reformat it and make a partition active? could that be the problem?

thanks

 

[Nothinman]

Windows should have set it active for you, but you can use fdisk to see if it's active or not. You don't need to format it and fdisk should be able to set it active just fine.