What is an active partition?

hi again,
By accident I've partitioned my external HHD as active (by fiddling around with the Disk Manager), and it seems I can't undo it. Can that cause any damage to the bootup? I hope not. My system should boot up from the C: drive, as far as I know, and C: is an internal drive and completely different from the external drive.

Diskpart can be used from the command line to set a patition as inactive.

DISKPART> help inactive
On disks with master boot record (MBR) disk formatting, marks
the partition with focus as inactive.

Leaving an active partition on your external disk can confuse or delay the boot process. I would use MiniTool Partition Wizard as suggested to set it to inactive.

hi,
Can't I use "diskpart inactive" to do the same thing? Provided the focus is correct .

oeivinr said:

Can't I use "diskpart inactive" to do the same thing?

You can use either. MiniTool is graphical and easy to see what you're doing. Diskpart is command line and needs a bit more thought to use, you have to be careful to select the right disk and then the right partition.