Set active

[johnrobert]

I read on here somewhere that if you could not get into recovery partition
You could make it active and get into it that way
What’s the best utility for doing this?
XP is installed on the D partition and recovery is on C
C is a primary partition
I tried Spotmau disk genius but the active button was greyed out

Its a Gateway 836GH

 

[Martyn]

Not had to do it myself but the obvious thought would be Windows Disk Manager?

 

[BryanLee]

From a command line:

diskpart

list disk

You will be presented with the disks and an associated number.

select disk #

Substitute the # with the number for the drive you want

list partion

select partion #

Substitute the # with the number for the partition you want

active

It should say "partition is now active"

 

[FoolishTech]

Doesn't always work - what you describe...

However if you are looking for a free program to work with partitions, I've used GParted for this type of work and it does just fine.

 

[BryanLee]

True, but it is fast. If it doesn't work you can always look elsewhere.

 

[johnrobert]

Thanks I will remember this for next time
I got a Gateway XP SP1 disk and installed on the big partition D
However in windows all files are on D of course, not good I reinstalled again after deleting the 4 gig C: fat32 partition
My restore partition is now gone, hope it won’t come back to haunt me, but for some reason it was not letting me make it active
A pizza tech put windows 7 starter edition which is designed for netbooks all kinds of bios problems

 

[Encrypted Existence]

Doesn't always work - what you describe...

However if you are looking for a free program to work with partitions, I've used GParted for this type of work and it does just fine.

+1 for GParted. I have used it to mark my recovery partition as active and boot from it. Works great.

Edit: Puppy Linux comes with GParted built in.

 

[16k_zx81]

+257,000 for Gparted. Been using it for years. Very handy piece of kit.

Also "Rebuilt Hiren's" has a bunch of good partition tools but I wont mention that here because of the dubious legality.

It is, however, an excellent resource for this kind of thing.

 

[johnrobert]

Going back to my MCSE days when windows is on D doesn’t it put the first part of boot on C anyway
Maybe C was active all along
It’s the weird way Gateway puts there restore on a 4 gig C and makes it a fat32, so you could start a dos session maybe.
When new OS was put on whatever key was used at boot time to launch restore was lost