Confusion about boot drive drive lables system reserved is not C

So my PC would not boot and I tried to repair the boot partition with Macrium.

Here Macrium wants to know what drive is the active partition. The system reserve is usually only 100 or so meg tiny thing really I am not booting to that right ?
The system reserve contains the Boot manager code and the database for the drive table right ? I am booting from the larger one right or Im confused about this I chose the top one because it had it checked but im pretty sure im not booting to that one im booting to the one that's bigger that has windows 10 on it.

Legacy bios installations can have the bcd boot files on the same partition as the C drive partition. It is pretty rare as this a backwards compatibility feature. So select partition checked and it should be fine.

DonMurray said:

So my PC would not boot and I tried to repair the boot partition with Macrium.... Here Macrium wants to know what drive is the active partition. The system reserve is usually only 100 or so meg tiny thing really I am not booting to that right ?

Yes, a Legacy/MBR system initially boots from the System partition, which in turn will load the Windows system from the C: partition. The term 'Active partition' only applies to an MBR partition layout, a UEFI/GPT system has no such thing as an active partition, it always boots from its EFI partition.

Here is my fully working Legacy install as seen by MiniTool Partition Wizard. Note that it is System that is the active boot partition, not the C: partition.



And when I boot the Macrium recovery media on that same system and run 'fix Windows boot problems' it shows the same thing as your screenshot, that System should be marked Active.
.

Hello @DonMurray,

Here is some information about Booting a computer, and the sequence involved that you might find interesting [ or NOT ] . . .

Startup sequence:

The CPU starts and fetches instructions into RAM from the BIOS, which is stored in the ROM.
The BIOS starts the monitor and keyboard, and does some basic checks to make sure the computer is working properly. For example, it will look for the RAM.
The BIOS then starts the boot sequence. It will look for the operating system.
If you don’t change any of the settings, the BIOS will fetch the operating system from the hard drive and load it into the RAM.
The BIOS then transfers control to the operating system.

Source > The Startup Sequence

I hope this helps.