Primary or Active Partition ?

[leachim]

I have been messing around with installing and cloning Win 7 and it won't completely boot

I have noticed that there are 2 partitions

100MB System Reserved - Healthy Active Primary
984 Gb - Healthy Primary

Shouldn't the bigger partition be Active ?

The 100MB partition has a Drive Letter

Should I change the larger partition to Active - although I did do this earlier - won't boot so tried a Startup Repair - mentioned something about "Should be C Drive" - Changing on next reboot.... It booted but acted strange - couldn't find restore points etc

The bigger partition should be D:

Can I change the small partition to non active ??

[Jintan]

Hello leachim,

You're kinda off on the wrong foot here. That System Reserved partition contains the boot files, and so the settings are correct. Better to ignore those things and concentrate on why your Windows 7 install has problems.

It booted but acted strange - couldn't find restore points etc

Why not explain in more detail what you mean by all that please.

[leachim]

Thanks

Doing this for a client.

Recent instal of Wins 7 Ultimate gets to blue welcome screen and flashes black every 10 secs. Mouse works.

Went through a whole load of ideas yesterday inc Repair. Took out drive and cloned it to a 2TB disk. This is when I noticed about the Active and Non Active partitions when it was plugged in via USB

I saw from the old disk that the Operating system was D:, but when I did a Repair on the cloned drive it did say it was changing drive letters to C:

I got it booting last night and noticed that no restore points (C: missing) in System Restore properties window

Anyway - I cloned it all again and did a repair - it only mentioned about changes to BCD, and then went back to the black flashes

Does the same in Safe Mode

Graphics ?

[Jintan]

Cloning Windows 7 from a different computer? With different devices?

[leachim]

No, its OK - same device

Ended up doing an in place upgrade after I managed to get it booting

Can I just ask what we can expect to see when reading it via usb on another computer......

Should the System Reserved be ACTIVE, PRIMARY, HEALTHY

and what of the OS partition ?

Some have 3 partitions....

Thanks

[Jintan]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/m.../gg441289.aspx

[leachim]

Very Useful

Thanks

[Jintan]

I needed to learn it myself. Always knew that partition had some purpose, but never looked it up.