Active Partition?

Win98SE 7 Gig HD
My HD has a Primary Dos partition and an Extended Dos Logical partition (size roughly 3 G and 4 Gig respectively). I have cloned Win95 onto the D:, extended Dos, drive. C: is currently set as Active. If I set the D: partition as Active, will it boot to that drive, that is, to Win95? Will I foul things up royally if I try?

 

Having received no replies, I went ahead and changed the active partition to D: and it did not boot. So now the question becomes, what does it mean to be "Active ".
(And the deeper question is probably, "did I successfully clone Win95 to D: in the first place." Explorer says it's there, but does that mean it's properly installed?)

 

Setting the partition active should make it bootable but.... Win9x won't boot from a logical partition. It needs to be a primary partition in order for it to work. You have to use fdisk or an app like Partition Magic to convert it to a primary partition. If you use fdisk you lose everything on the d: drive when you do this which probably doesn't make much difference if you still have the image available. If you use fdisk make sure you delete the right partition when you do this. If you aren't comfortable using fdisk it would be better to use something like PM. You could use it to convert it to a primary partition just as it is. Another thing to be aware of is that when using win9x it's possible to lose data if there are two visible primary partitions. So, when booting to one of the windows versions the other should be hidden from it. In the past, I've accidently booted to windows with a setup like this and forgot to hide the other primary partition. I never had any problems with it but I didn't leave it that way for very long once I dicovered it. I don't know how likely it is that it will give you problems, only know that it's possible. Partition Magic will hide a partition for you. It also comes with boot magic which allows you to select to OS you want to boot from and then will hide the other one accordingly. If you don't want to go the PM route, there are free boot managers available that I would guess do pretty much the same thing as Boot Magic. I haven't ever used any of them so I can't say for sure.

 

If I understand this properly:
Only the primary partition on a HD is bootable.
Only one partition on a HD Can be the primary partition at a time.
The primary partition must be set to "active" before it is bootable.
Setting the extended DOS partition to "active" does not make
the extended DOS partition bootable, BUT
It does render the primary partition unbootable.
Therefore, the "active" designation would seem to serve little purpose except to render the primary unbootable when applied to the extended Dos partition, thus making "active" a misnomer since it serves only to make the only bootable partition inactive.
Is this a vestige of some pre-Win98 arrangement when setting a partition as "active" might have made more sense?
It is a theoretical question only (although I would welcome an answer if anyone has it) since I don't, indeed can't, accomplish much by making any partition other than the primary one active except to render the whole hard disk unbootable and there are other ways to accomplish that, if that were my goal.

 

It depends on the OS you're using. Win9x has to be on a primary partition.

Not really. You can have more than one primary partition. It's just that when using win9x you should hide one primary partition when using the other.

Yes.

The way you have it set up right now that statement is correct. It is however, possible to set the extended partition active and boot from it. It just won't work the way you currently have it set up. Right now you have (if I understand it correctly) one primary partition ( c: ) and one extended partition in which you created a logical partition. In order for you to boot from it you need to delete the logical partition and create a primary partition within the extended partition instead of a logical partition. Once you change the logical partition to a primary, copy your image file back on to it and then you should be able to set it active and boot from it. Actually, you'll be setting the primary partition within the extended partition active, not the extended partition itself. The extended partition is only, for lack of a better term, a container of sorts in which to create new partitions. There are other limitations with win9x when doing this sort of thing but with the size of your hard drive they shouldn't be a concern.

 

Although I haven't tried it since my last posting, in the past I have received a message from fdisk that "primary dos already exists" when I tried to make the extended dos drive primary. Changing it would require deleting the primary dos that already existed. Perhaps PM could work around this limitation? Or is it possible to "hide" one primary from the other via fdisk itself?

 

Well, now that I think about it I believe you're right about fdisk and only one primary partition. Seems to me I remember reading something about that in the PM manual when I first bought it. Though fdisk is certainly no stranger to me, it's been a while since I've used it as I've had PM for a long time now and have always used it for this type of thing. Sorry. If you use PM you can get around this limitation however. It can create more than one primary partition on one drive. Create the partition with PM and install Boot Magic and you'll have what you want.

 

This will probably remain a theoretical dilemma unless I get around to trying PM, but thanks in any event for your patience and help.

 

Yeah, guess you're kinda stuck. If you can come up with the bucks for PM you should give it a try. It's really an amazing program. It's never let me down. Thanks for posting back.