
Tip: These two features can only work for the primary partitions in the hard disk with MBR mode partitions. MiniTool Partition Wizard offers Set Active and Set Inactive features for you to fix the system boot issue caused by wrong active partition. MiniTool Partition Wizard is a good choice.Ĭlick to tweet How to Mark Partition as Active/Inactive with MiniTool The easy and effective way is to apply a piece of third party partition software to correct the mistake. If a wrong partition is marked as active, what should you do then? So, this reflects the importance to set the system partition as active. In general, if you mark a wrong partition as active or mark the system partition as inactive, the computer will show as missing operating system or operating system not found, and won’t boot successfully as usual. The above information is about active vs inactive partition. However, it is possible that the primary partition you marked as active does not contain the Windows boot files or boot files for another operating system. In addition, it is impossible to set EFI and logical partitions as active. Other primary partitions should be set as inactive to guarantee the normal boot of computer. Only one primary partition on a hard drive can be set as active, and it should be the system partition. Before Windows 7 (including Windows 7), the system and boot partitions were the same and were given the identifier C: by default after Windows 7, boot partition and system partition are separated except for some special situations, such as installing Windows to a partitioned hard disk.

For better understanding of active partition, you can learn something about these four partitions as follows: Inactive Partition FAQĪccording to Microsoft definition, an active partition is firstly a primary partition, and then a system partition.
