Weird HD issue...

[emeritus]

I have 3 Hard Drives. Maxtor 40 and 80, and a Hitachi 120. Now the 40 is the boot drive, and I have don't have a problem booting the system up. The issue, is that all 3 hard drives are listed as active, when only the 40 should be active. How can I change the status of the other 2 drives, without losing the data?

 

[dreamliner77]

Partition Magic should be able to help you out.

 

[emeritus]

Partition Magic isn't helping, it lists the drives as active, but I can't change it.

 

[Elektro Slime]

what exactly do you mean by active?

 

[Tweakfiend]

I have 3 Hard Drives. Maxtor 40 and 80, and a Hitachi 120. Now the 40 is the boot drive, and I have don't have a problem booting the system up. The issue, is that all 3 hard drives are listed as active, when only the 40 should be active. How can I change the status of the other 2 drives, without losing the data?

For " active" read Accessible....... or dont you want the other 2 accessible after boot up ?

 

[emeritus]

By 'active' I mean the system sees all of my my hard drives as boot drives when only one contains the OS and is bootable. Only one partition or drive in a system, is supposed to be active, (unless you have a multi OS system). I actually have solved the issue, I found a Powerquest utility called PTEdit32, in otherwords, Partition Edit 32bit. It worked great. Now my drives are listed properly. Thanx for the responses.

 

[Zedric]

I've never come across this as being an issue. If there are other active partitions than the boot partition, so what? As long as they are not in the boot list, they won't be booted. Right?

 

[emeritus]

Actually, I did run into a problem once with this. I rearranged my hard drives, and it tried to boot off of one of the other drives instead of my C drive, which it then saw as D. If the other drives were not active, it would not have happened. It kept on giving me the NTDLR missing error, because my system got confused. I had to disconnect the other drives and boot up the system then turn it off and reconnect the drives before it would work correctly. Thats when I noticed that all the drives were active.

 

[Zedric]

Ah, but then they were in the boot list.