Active Partitions on Hard Drive?

[Keebler Elf]

I have multiple hard drives on my computer with multiple (old) operating systems that I no longer use (yes, I'm going to format them clean someday).

Some of these hard drives have multiple partitions with an old operating system on one of them. Some of these are listed as having "Active" partitions. I may want to go back to one of these old OS installations at some point.

Question: Does making the "Active" OS drive partitions "Inactive" via the Diskpart command mean the partition will no longer be visible in Windows? I'm fine if it means I can't boot from the old OS but if it means the entire partition "disappears" until made Active again, then that I care about because there may be some other data on the partition that I want.

 

[benstt]

I have multiple hard drives on my computer with multiple (old) operating systems that I no longer use (yes, I'm going to format them clean someday).

Some of these hard drives have multiple partitions with an old operating system on one of them. Some of these are listed as having "Active" partitions. I may want to go back to one of these old OS installations at some point.

Question: Does making the "Active" OS drive partitions "Inactive" via the Diskpart command mean the partition will no longer be visible in Windows? I'm fine if it means I can't boot from the old OS but if it means the entire partition "disappears" until made Active again, then that I care about because there may be some other data on the partition that I want.

I think you can only have one active partition per physical drive. Traditionally it's used only during boot time by the to help automatically set the partition you want to boot from, from your boot disk. Modern bootloaders mess with this a bit to allow dual or more OS's to be booted.

I think windows will see it as long as it is not made a 'hidden' partition. That's a different set of commands in diskpart.

Be very careful messing with this. Having a recent boot utility CD on hand is advised in case things go wrong.