How to make a volume active. How to make a section active

How to make a disk partition active?

Master's response:

The Windows bootloader location is controlled by the active partition hard drive. Only a user with sufficient computer knowledge can perform the operation of selecting an active partition. Inexperienced users are not recommended to do this for security reasons.

First you need to press the "Start" button to call the main menu of the system. Open the "Control Panel" item to carry out the procedure for selecting the active partition of your computer's hard drive.

Go to System and Maintenance, then select Administration.

In the "Storage Devices" group in the Navigation Pane, you must select the "Disk Management" item, and then open context menu section you want to make active. Do this by clicking the right mouse button.

To execute the selected operation, you need to apply the command "Make section active"

Returning to the main "Start" menu, go to "All Programs" to carry out the operation of selecting the active partition of the computer's hard drive in another way.

Having specified the item "Standard", open the context menu of the element "Command line" with a single right-click of the mouse.

To comply with the security requirements of Microsoft Corporation, you should select the "Run as administrator" item, and only after that run the tool command line.

In the command line field, enter the diskpart value, and then, in the DISKPART command line field, enter the list partition command, indicating the number of the partition that is selected to be set as active.

In the DISKPART command line field, you should then enter the value select partitionx, where x is the partition to be activated. To confirm the execution of this command, you must enter the active value in the field of the same DISKPART line.

Remember that only one partition can be active on one hard drive. Modifying or deleting such an active partition may make it impossible to start the system later.

Helpful advice. The logical disk cannot be selected as active, since only the main partition can play the role of the latter.

It happens that a certain section of the hard disk needs to be made active or vice versa inactive. For example, the user has a new HDD Or a new partition has been created on it. And it happens that, due to lack of experience, they did the wrong thing. This article will show you how to carry out these operations.

Installed on the active disk partition Windows bootloader, which starts loading the operating system. If you activate the wrong partition, then the operating system simply will not start. Therefore, more experienced users should penetrate these bowels.

Activating a hard disk partition can be done in several ways. This article will look at two of them. First, let's look at activating the partition through the Disk Management menu.

The first way to activate a hard disk partition

To start, press the key combination "Win + R". In the window that appears, enter the command "diskmgmt.msc" and click "OK".

Section window will appear hard drives. Select the desired section, right-click on it and select "Make section active".

Voila! The section is active.

The second way to activate a hard disk partition

The second way to activate a hard disk partition is through the command line. You must run the command prompt with administrator rights. Click "Start", in the line "Run" enter "cmd". Right-click on the command prompt shortcut and select "Run as administrator". On the command line, we will run the built-in "Disk part" utility. To do this, we will write several commands in the already running command line. Let's start with the "diskpart" command and press "Enter". The line "DISKPART>" will appear.

To select the disk we need, enter the command "sel disk #". Instead of #, we indicate the serial number of the disk we need and we see that the disk we need is selected.

Then we need to select the section to be activated. We display a list of partitions with the “list part” command and, similarly to the selection of disks, select a partition with the “sel part” command.

Now all we need is to give the command "active" and the partition will be activated.

To deactivate the desired hard disk partition through the command line, you will need to do the same manipulations, with the exception of the last command. Instead of "active" we prescribe "inactive".

Deactivating a partition through Disk Management is possible only after formatting the partition. And this is not always desirable.

Sometimes when reinstalling the operating Windows systems or when switching from more new system on the old one, an error occurs: " An operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drivers that don't contain an operating system". Also, this error may occur due to improper interference in the hidden boot partition hard drive. In this guide, you can learn how to fix the "An operating system wasn't found" error.

In Windows 7, 8 or 10, the system boots from a hidden partition (reserved by the system). Each of these operating systems hidden section has a different size: in Windows 7 - 100 MB, in Windows 8 - 350 MB, in Windows 10 - 500 MB.

When installing the system, you probably could see these sections.

The hidden section contains the operating system boot files. If for some reason this section becomes inactive, then the operating system will not boot accordingly and you will see the error "An operating system wasn't found". Try disconnecting any drivers that don"t contain an operating system".

To fix this problem, all you need to do is make section active.

A hidden partition must always be primary and active. This is an iron rule, thanks to which the BIOS understands that the download files are located on the specified partition. Let's take a look at what is stored on this hidden partition as an experiment. First, let's go to Disk Management,

Since I'm using Windows 7, you can see that I have 100 MB System Reserved. If you assign a letter to this hidden partition, it will be displayed in the "Computer" window, provided that the item "display hidden protected system files" is activated in the system settings.

As you can see, this disk contains boot files OS.

Below we will consider two ways by which the error will go away and the system will boot up normally again. By the way, all manipulations can be carried out both on Windows 7 and on Windows 8 and Windows 10.

Method 1. How to make a partition active using Acronis Disk Director

First you need to create a bootable Acronis disk Disk Director if it doesn't exist. The image can be downloaded on the Internet, and then burned to disk. If you do not know how to do this, you can read the article. Next, boot from this media.

The hidden section must always be active, as I wrote above, that is, in the program it must be marked with a red flag. As you can see below, the hidden section is inactive,

We fix this - right-click on the section and click on the "Mark as active" item,

For the changes to take effect, click on the button with the "Apply pending operations" checkbox.

After the operation is completed, you can see that the partition has become active.

Now it remains to restart the computer. If everything is done correctly, the system will boot up and you will be taken to your usual desktop.

Method 2. How to make a partition active using the Windows installation disc

If there is no disk with Acronis Disk Director at hand, then do not despair. You can do without this program, but the installation disk with operating system we still need it. Boot from it by pressing any key on the keyboard,

Windows 10 offers a lot of options for working with storage drives. Compared to the past Windows versions, the current disk management tool has more features and is able to completely replace the command line. However, you can still use it if you wish.

How to Open Disk Management in Windows 10

To open Disk Management, do the following:

There are also several other options for getting into the Disk Management menu. For example:

• Type the diskmgt.msc command into the "run" line. The "Run" line is called by the key combination Win + R (or create executable file with this team).
• In the task manager, select the "File" section and go to the "Disk Management" item.
• And there is also an option to open the command line utility for disk management. To do this, in the execute window, you need to drive the command ‘DiskPart.exe’.

If one method doesn't work, just try another. If, when you try to open disk management, the system gives an error connecting to the service, then you need to make sure that the antivirus program has not deleted the dmdskmgr.dll file

If this file is not found, you need to restore it to its original location. You can return it or take it from boot disk Windows, or by using the system file check command. It is done like this:

1. Open the Run menu (Win+R) and type cmd there.
2. In the command prompt that opens, you need to drive the sfc command and then scannow.
3. To verify the data, the program will need to specify the path to installation disk with your Windows 10. Do this and the files will be scanned.

Error checking

The check can also be done through the command line, but it is much easier to do this through the Disk Management program. It is enough to do the following:

How to create a local drive

If you want to create a local disk in addition to where you have Windows installed, you can do this through the same Disk Management program. After opening it, we take the following actions:

1. Select the unallocated area of ​​the disk. At the bottom, the area available for stakeout will be shown in black.
2. We right-click on this place to open the context window and select "Create a simple volume ..."
3. Following the instructions of the program, we reach the section "Specifying the volume size". Here you can set either the total amount of memory available on the disk, or incomplete if you want to split one disk into several local ones.
4. Next, we set letter designation local disk.
5. Then, it remains only to ask file system(These days, it's worth installing NTFS, as it has no file size limits.) The rest of the values ​​can be left as default.
6. In the next window, all that remains is to confirm the specified data and the local disk will be created.

Shrink and expand volume in Windows 10

Volume expansion is an increase in the size of a local disk using its unallocated area. Unallocated is the area of ​​new hard drives, and it can also be obtained by compressing local drives.

How to shrink a volume in Windows 10

To shrink a volume in Windows 10, do the following:

Possible Compression Issues

If you are unable to shrink the volume, then you should do the following:

• Do a disk defragmentation - this may increase the maximum available value for compression.
• Disable antivirus programs before attempting compression. For example, Norton antivirus can block the ability to shrink a drive.
• And also, to increase the space available for compression, you can disable the paging file.

How to extend a volume in Windows 10

If you already have an unallocated area of ​​the disk, then expanding the volume is not difficult. It is done like this:

Possible expansion problems

If you have problems expanding the volume. Check the following:

• Make sure you have a fairly large unallocated area on the disk.
• Only an area from adjacent departments can be used for expansion. That is, if you have an unallocated area that is not adjacent to the volume being expanded, then expanding it will not work. In such cases, it can help third party programs.
• Make sure that the number of created partitions is not more than four. There is a limit on the number of primary partitions created.

Resizing the hard drive (video)

defragmentation

Disk defragmentation is needed to increase the response speed to files by placing them more densely on the hard disk. It's very easy to make it:

1. Right-click on the drive and go to "Properties"
2. Open the "Service" section
3. Click the Optimize button.
4. Select the disk we want to fragment and click "Optimize".
5. We are waiting for the end of disk fragmentation.

cleaning

Disk Cleanup can also help you free up the required space. This can be done using the utility of the same name. For this:

Disk merging

To merge partitions of your disk into one local partition, you need to use third-party programs. However, using Windows tools you can achieve the same result simply by transferring all the files from one disk to another, then deleting the local disk that we do not need and expanding the second one to the space available after deleting.
But if you really want to merge two disks, you can, for example, use the EaseUS program Partition Master. We do the following:

Now you know how to manage disks on your computer and can easily create the necessary local drives. I am very glad that in Windows 10 disk management has become even more accessible to all users and now everyone can perform any disk manipulations.