Hard disk question

I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.

As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?

On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:


I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.



Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.


As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?

On 12/28/2014 8:29 AM, philo wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:


I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.



Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.

I was hoping for an answer to the question.
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.

With Gparted, setting the active flag is a manual operation.
I don't remember ever having the ability to manage that flag
from windows, but I never had a reason to try.


I did the experiment.
A bootable linux SD card shows up as Active.
A non-bootable SD storage card shows up without the Active marker.
A multiboot USB thumb drive shows up as Active
All are formatted FAT32.
That's what I expected.

Under the conditions described below, it's not obvious why the CF
card would be marked active.


As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?

In article , says...

On 12/28/2014 8:29 AM, philo wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:


I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.



Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.

I was hoping for an answer to the question.
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.

With Gparted, setting the active flag is a manual operation.
I don't remember ever having the ability to manage that flag
from windows, but I never had a reason to try.


I did the experiment.
A bootable linux SD card shows up as Active.
A non-bootable SD storage card shows up without the Active marker.
A multiboot USB thumb drive shows up as Active
All are formatted FAT32.
That's what I expected.

Under the conditions described below, it's not obvious why the CF
card would be marked active.


As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?



Disk Management - right click on drive allows "Set Active ..." don't see
obvious "UnActivate" option.

I used to be very confortable with all this during early DOS/Windows era
and wouldn't hesititate using Norton's Disk Editer to undelete files
etc. (edit leading special character in dir listing if I remember
correctly). I don't believe there's been that much added to it so I
suspect I could mark all primary partitions on all the hard disks as
active and there'd be no ill effects. That said, I suspect the BIOS
would present them as bootable devices during boot if I was to
afterwards hit magic key and choose one to try and boot to. Then it'd
fail and fallback ...

That seem about right?

On 12/28/2014 11:34 AM, pjp wrote:
In article , says...

On 12/28/2014 8:29 AM, philo wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:


I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.



Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.

I was hoping for an answer to the question.
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.

With Gparted, setting the active flag is a manual operation.
I don't remember ever having the ability to manage that flag
from windows, but I never had a reason to try.


I did the experiment.
A bootable linux SD card shows up as Active.
A non-bootable SD storage card shows up without the Active marker.
A multiboot USB thumb drive shows up as Active
All are formatted FAT32.
That's what I expected.

Under the conditions described below, it's not obvious why the CF
card would be marked active.


As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?



Disk Management - right click on drive allows "Set Active ..." don't see
obvious "UnActivate" option.

I used to be very confortable with all this during early DOS/Windows era
and wouldn't hesititate using Norton's Disk Editer to undelete files
etc. (edit leading special character in dir listing if I remember
correctly). I don't believe there's been that much added to it so I
suspect I could mark all primary partitions on all the hard disks as
active and there'd be no ill effects. That said, I suspect the BIOS
would present them as bootable devices during boot if I was to
afterwards hit magic key and choose one to try and boot to. Then it'd
fail and fallback ...

That seem about right?



I can see why Disk Management would not allow one to remove the "active"
flag from the drive Windows boots from...but have no idea why it does
not allow the "active" flag to be changed on another primary partition
on another drive.

It can easily be done on Linux through the use of Gparted

pjp wrote:
In article , says...
On 12/28/2014 8:29 AM, philo wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:

I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.


Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.
I was hoping for an answer to the question.
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.

With Gparted, setting the active flag is a manual operation.
I don't remember ever having the ability to manage that flag
from windows, but I never had a reason to try.


I did the experiment.
A bootable linux SD card shows up as Active.
A non-bootable SD storage card shows up without the Active marker.
A multiboot USB thumb drive shows up as Active
All are formatted FAT32.
That's what I expected.

Under the conditions described below, it's not obvious why the CF
card would be marked active.
As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?


Disk Management - right click on drive allows "Set Active ..." don't see
obvious "UnActivate" option.

I used to be very confortable with all this during early DOS/Windows era
and wouldn't hesititate using Norton's Disk Editer to undelete files
etc. (edit leading special character in dir listing if I remember
correctly). I don't believe there's been that much added to it so I
suspect I could mark all primary partitions on all the hard disks as
active and there'd be no ill effects. That said, I suspect the BIOS
would present them as bootable devices during boot if I was to
afterwards hit magic key and choose one to try and boot to. Then it'd
fail and fallback ...

That seem about right?

Active is the boot flag, is it not ?

The MBR (sector 0) has a 64 byte table with room for the definition
of four primary partitions, or three primary plus one extended partition.
Each of those partition definitions (16 bytes), has one byte set aside
for a boot flag.

When an OS is installed, the OS installer can set the boot flag on
a partition if it wants. Nothing prevents mass chaos, such as setting
more than one partition with the boot flag asserted. By convention,
Windows expects *one* partition to have the boot flag set. Linux, on
the other hand, the boot code it places in the MBR, is not boot flag
dependent. Linux has its own scheme for figuring out what to boot.
So the boot flag isn't even universal, as such.

To check the boot flag value, and compare to what Disk Management
shows, use PTEDIT32.

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis...s/PTEDIT32.zip

On a modern OS, you click that executable and select "Run as Administrator",
so that the tool can access the MBR. Generally, block level access requires
administrator permissions.

In this example, the second partition has the boot flag (0x80).
The second partition would be "active".
The second partition, the Type field is 0x07 or NTFS.

http://www.macrium.com/images/ptedit32.jpg

That's a great tool for quick hack jobs. For example, you
can shuffle rows of numbers in there, and correct partition
manager errors, such as arranging partition entries in non-spatial
order. The display turns red in color, for any field you edit, so
you can keep track of what you propose to change as you edit.
I generally take a screen shot of the "before" display information,
so I can verify I didn't make any typing errors.

If you do move the boot flag, by changing the current "80" entry
to "00" and change some other partition to "80", that should
very nicely prevent Windows from booting.

Nothing prevents you from setting all four boot flags to 80 or
setting them to 42 if you want. But only certain patterns of values
for those bytes, makes sense for a Windows user.

Paul

Ken1943 wrote:
On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:14:02 -0400, pjp
wrote:


I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.

As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?

To make things more strange, on my 8.1 Asus laptop with a GPT disk and
EFI, nothing is "active".


KenW

They have storage for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

"Legacy BIOS bootable (equivalent to active flag..."

Maybe some other GPT-aware partition manager can show
the value.

HTH,
Paul

On 12/28/2014 9:34 AM, pjp wrote:
In article , says...

On 12/28/2014 8:29 AM, philo wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:


I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.



Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.

I was hoping for an answer to the question.
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.

With Gparted, setting the active flag is a manual operation.
I don't remember ever having the ability to manage that flag
from windows, but I never had a reason to try.


I did the experiment.
A bootable linux SD card shows up as Active.
A non-bootable SD storage card shows up without the Active marker.
A multiboot USB thumb drive shows up as Active
All are formatted FAT32.
That's what I expected.

Under the conditions described below, it's not obvious why the CF
card would be marked active.


As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?



Disk Management - right click on drive allows "Set Active ..." don't see
obvious "UnActivate" option.

I used to be very confortable with all this during early DOS/Windows era
and wouldn't hesititate using Norton's Disk Editer to undelete files
etc. (edit leading special character in dir listing if I remember
correctly). I don't believe there's been that much added to it so I
suspect I could mark all primary partitions on all the hard disks as
active and there'd be no ill effects. That said, I suspect the BIOS
would present them as bootable devices during boot if I was to
afterwards hit magic key and choose one to try and boot to. Then it'd
fail and fallback ...

That seem about right?

My experience is that marking a partition active automagically unmarks
any other partition on that drive.

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 08:49:01 -0800, mike wrote:
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.


Here, let me Google that for you:

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/a/activepa.htm

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:02:20 -0600, philo* wrote:

I can see why Disk Management would not allow one to remove the "active"
flag from the drive Windows boots from...but have no idea why it does
not allow the "active" flag to be changed on another primary partition
on another drive.

It can easily be done on Linux through the use of Gparted

I believe I've done it with the Windows utility, diskpart. Run it from a
Command Prompt.

Random link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415
A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility

The GUI-based Disk Management applet has always been limited in
functionality.

--

Char Jackson

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 13:04:12 -0500, Paul wrote:

pjp wrote:
In article , says...
On 12/28/2014 8:29 AM, philo wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:

I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.


Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.
I was hoping for an answer to the question.
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.

With Gparted, setting the active flag is a manual operation.
I don't remember ever having the ability to manage that flag
from windows, but I never had a reason to try.


I did the experiment.
A bootable linux SD card shows up as Active.
A non-bootable SD storage card shows up without the Active marker.
A multiboot USB thumb drive shows up as Active
All are formatted FAT32.
That's what I expected.

Under the conditions described below, it's not obvious why the CF
card would be marked active.
As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?


Disk Management - right click on drive allows "Set Active ..." don't see
obvious "UnActivate" option.

I used to be very confortable with all this during early DOS/Windows era
and wouldn't hesititate using Norton's Disk Editer to undelete files
etc. (edit leading special character in dir listing if I remember
correctly). I don't believe there's been that much added to it so I
suspect I could mark all primary partitions on all the hard disks as
active and there'd be no ill effects. That said, I suspect the BIOS
would present them as bootable devices during boot if I was to
afterwards hit magic key and choose one to try and boot to. Then it'd
fail and fallback ...

That seem about right?

Active is the boot flag, is it not ?

The MBR (sector 0) has a 64 byte table with room for the definition
of four primary partitions, or three primary plus one extended partition.
Each of those partition definitions (16 bytes), has one byte set aside
for a boot flag.

When an OS is installed, the OS installer can set the boot flag on
a partition if it wants. Nothing prevents mass chaos, such as setting
more than one partition with the boot flag asserted. By convention,
Windows expects *one* partition to have the boot flag set. Linux, on
the other hand, the boot code it places in the MBR, is not boot flag
dependent. Linux has its own scheme for figuring out what to boot.
So the boot flag isn't even universal, as such.

To check the boot flag value, and compare to what Disk Management
shows, use PTEDIT32.

I'm aware of your fondness for certain 3rd party tools, (PTEDIT and dd come
to mind), and there's nothing wrong with that, but in this case I'd start
with the built-in Windows utility, diskpart. Diskpart can show the current
value of the Active flag, and can change it to either state.

--

Char Jackson

On 12/28/2014 07:48 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:02:20 -0600, philo wrote:

I can see why Disk Management would not allow one to remove the "active"
flag from the drive Windows boots from...but have no idea why it does
not allow the "active" flag to be changed on another primary partition
on another drive.

It can easily be done on Linux through the use of Gparted

I believe I've done it with the Windows utility, diskpart. Run it from a
Command Prompt.

Random link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415
A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility

The GUI-based Disk Management applet has always been limited in
functionality.




Thanks for the link.

That confirms my thoughts that Disk Management was purposely limited to
prevent someone from ruing their system.

Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 13:04:12 -0500, Paul wrote:

pjp wrote:
In article , says...
On 12/28/2014 8:29 AM, philo wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:
I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.

Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.
I was hoping for an answer to the question.
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.

With Gparted, setting the active flag is a manual operation.
I don't remember ever having the ability to manage that flag
from windows, but I never had a reason to try.


I did the experiment.
A bootable linux SD card shows up as Active.
A non-bootable SD storage card shows up without the Active marker.
A multiboot USB thumb drive shows up as Active
All are formatted FAT32.
That's what I expected.

Under the conditions described below, it's not obvious why the CF
card would be marked active.
As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?

Disk Management - right click on drive allows "Set Active ..." don't see
obvious "UnActivate" option.

I used to be very confortable with all this during early DOS/Windows era
and wouldn't hesititate using Norton's Disk Editer to undelete files
etc. (edit leading special character in dir listing if I remember
correctly). I don't believe there's been that much added to it so I
suspect I could mark all primary partitions on all the hard disks as
active and there'd be no ill effects. That said, I suspect the BIOS
would present them as bootable devices during boot if I was to
afterwards hit magic key and choose one to try and boot to. Then it'd
fail and fallback ...

That seem about right?
Active is the boot flag, is it not ?

The MBR (sector 0) has a 64 byte table with room for the definition
of four primary partitions, or three primary plus one extended partition.
Each of those partition definitions (16 bytes), has one byte set aside
for a boot flag.

When an OS is installed, the OS installer can set the boot flag on
a partition if it wants. Nothing prevents mass chaos, such as setting
more than one partition with the boot flag asserted. By convention,
Windows expects *one* partition to have the boot flag set. Linux, on
the other hand, the boot code it places in the MBR, is not boot flag
dependent. Linux has its own scheme for figuring out what to boot.
So the boot flag isn't even universal, as such.

To check the boot flag value, and compare to what Disk Management
shows, use PTEDIT32.

I'm aware of your fondness for certain 3rd party tools, (PTEDIT and dd come
to mind), and there's nothing wrong with that, but in this case I'd start
with the built-in Windows utility, diskpart. Diskpart can show the current
value of the Active flag, and can change it to either state.


I selected that tool for its educational value.
Someone wants to know what a boot flag is, that
display gets right to the details.

Paul

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 21:05:04 -0500, Paul wrote:

Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 13:04:12 -0500, Paul wrote:

pjp wrote:
In article , says...
On 12/28/2014 8:29 AM, philo wrote:
On 12/28/2014 10:14 AM, pjp wrote:
I see under Disk Management some of my hard disks are marked "Active,
Healthy ..." where-as some others are marked just "Healthy ...". I
understand "Active" is required for using drive to boot but it seems
rather ad-hoc what Windows thinks of all the extra drives on my system.

Disk Management does /not/ apply ad-hoc settings to it's identification
scheme. If a drive is marked "active" that's simply because it is so.
I was hoping for an answer to the question.
For me, the question is not about what Disk Management reports, but how/why
partitions get marked as active.

With Gparted, setting the active flag is a manual operation.
I don't remember ever having the ability to manage that flag
from windows, but I never had a reason to try.


I did the experiment.
A bootable linux SD card shows up as Active.
A non-bootable SD storage card shows up without the Active marker.
A multiboot USB thumb drive shows up as Active
All are formatted FAT32.
That's what I expected.

Under the conditions described below, it's not obvious why the CF
card would be marked active.
As examples, a CF card is marked Active but the SD, SM and MS card all
in same reader are not. My internal drive D (separate hd) is not along
with two of the four externals yet the other two externals are marked
"Active". None of these drives have any kind of OS on them and all were
formatted once (when first bought) using standard Windows formatting
utility. One is formatted exFat to facilitate using with a Mac also.

So what gives?

Disk Management - right click on drive allows "Set Active ..." don't see
obvious "UnActivate" option.

I used to be very confortable with all this during early DOS/Windows era
and wouldn't hesititate using Norton's Disk Editer to undelete files
etc. (edit leading special character in dir listing if I remember
correctly). I don't believe there's been that much added to it so I
suspect I could mark all primary partitions on all the hard disks as
active and there'd be no ill effects. That said, I suspect the BIOS
would present them as bootable devices during boot if I was to
afterwards hit magic key and choose one to try and boot to. Then it'd
fail and fallback ...

That seem about right?
Active is the boot flag, is it not ?

The MBR (sector 0) has a 64 byte table with room for the definition
of four primary partitions, or three primary plus one extended partition.
Each of those partition definitions (16 bytes), has one byte set aside
for a boot flag.

When an OS is installed, the OS installer can set the boot flag on
a partition if it wants. Nothing prevents mass chaos, such as setting
more than one partition with the boot flag asserted. By convention,
Windows expects *one* partition to have the boot flag set. Linux, on
the other hand, the boot code it places in the MBR, is not boot flag
dependent. Linux has its own scheme for figuring out what to boot.
So the boot flag isn't even universal, as such.

To check the boot flag value, and compare to what Disk Management
shows, use PTEDIT32.

I'm aware of your fondness for certain 3rd party tools, (PTEDIT and dd come
to mind), and there's nothing wrong with that, but in this case I'd start
with the built-in Windows utility, diskpart. Diskpart can show the current
value of the Active flag, and can change it to either state.


I selected that tool for its educational value.
Someone wants to know what a boot flag is, that
display gets right to the details.

I anticipate that you'll disagree, but I think that PTEDIT is a very poor
choice in this case, and in most similar cases. But especially in this case.

--

Char Jackson

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014 20:02:32 -0600, philo wrote:

That confirms my thoughts that Disk Management was purposely limited to
prevent someone from ruing their system.

you've set yourself up for some Char punning.

F.