Anyone advise regards the following ???

have an external harddrive which I want to split into three seperate partitions which are all to be made primary and active. running xp and formatting them via the standard xp disc managment software.

1/ fat32
2/ ntfs
3/ raw ( unformatted )

have formatted them all and they are all showing as primary, if I select one off them say fat32 and right click on the partition I can then select this partition to be made active and it is marked as such, if I then go to the next partition ie.ntfs ad again right click on it and select make active it will also show up as active but the active wording on the original partition ( fat32 ) goes, is it still infact a primary and active partition despite the last made active partition only marked as such ??

bit confused if anyone could advise ??

p.s in case anyone is wondering using my external drive with my Nintendo wii and the raw partition is put thru another software to giveit a formatt recognised by the wii itself !!!

 

Unless you boot from an OS loaded on the hard disk, ignore marking them active (boot flag)

All it does is tell a computer which tries to boot off this hard disk where the boot partition is.

 

Okay thanks for your reply, sorry possibly not explained properly the drive that I am connecting to the wii has to have all partitions primary and active, as I say no problem with right clicking and selecting make active its just that when I do this with the next partition the original partition is no longer marked as active.

just want to make sure it actually is, any idea ??
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Could it be the case you can infact only select one primary and active partition, all others can be primary but only one primary and active ??

 

The first sector (512 bytes) on a hard drive contains a partition table, which is made up of four "slots" each of which describes a partition - where it starts (CHS), where it ends (CHS), start (LBA), size (LBA sectors), type and whether it is active.

Each of these entries is either a "primary" partition, which is used directly, or an "extended" partition which is treat like a disk (and contains another, nested, partition table which describes logical partitions contained therein).

You can only ever have one "active" partition (and it must be a primary partition). Although theoretically your could set the active flag for each of the slots in the partition table, you would get unexpected results from the BIOS, boot sector etc. That is why XP only allows you to set one at a time!

mb

 

Thanks bit wiser now !!