Change the Active Partition of Your Hard Disk with Parted Magic
This guide shows how to change the boot partition of your hard disk. The boot partition is sometimes also called the active partition, both terms mean the exact same thing.When your computer starts, it will load the first sector of the boot hard drive into memory and execute the boot loader code stored in this sector. The boot loader code then looks for the partition on your hard drive which has the bootable flag set. It then passes control to another boot loader stored on that partition.Note: As you will see, this is not hard to do, but it's a critical procedure. It is recommended to back up your system before doing this, so you're able to to back if something goes wrong.
Steps
- We'll need a partitioning tool to change the active partition. "Parted Magic" is a small Linux distribution which does exactly what we want. The download is about 140 MB in size. You can also use the "Ultimate Boot CD", this boot CD contains Parted Magic as well, but it's bigger in download size because it contains many other programs.
- Download Parted Magic.
- Now you'll have to create a bootable media from which we can start Parted Magic. You have two choices: Create a bootable CD, or create a bootable USB pen drive. To create a bootable CD, see step 4. To create a bootable USB pen drive, see step 5.
- You can burn the ISO file to a CD with any CD burning software which is capable of burning image files. Do a Google search for "ImageBurn" and proceed to download and install the program . Start ImageBurn, select "write image file to disc", select the downloaded .iso file as source file and start burning. When you're finished, continue reading with step 6.
- We'll use a special tool to copy Parted Magic to a USB pen drive, because your pen drive needs to be made bootable. It's called "Universal USB installer". Go to http://www.pendrivelinux.com and proceed to download the Universal USB installer from the web site. Plug in your USB pen drive and backup any data stored on it, as it will be completely erased in the process. Start the program and proceed to agree the license agreement. From the first drop-down box, select "Parted Magic". In the text box below, select the .iso file you just downloaded. Then, select the correct drive letter for your USB pen drive and proceed.
- For Parted Magic to be able to detect your hard drive, it's important to change your hard drive's controller mode to IDE mode before proceeding. If you have an IDE hard disk, you don't need to configure anything. Proceed with step 7. If you have a SATA hard disk, you'll need to disable the controller's AHCI mode in BIOS and set it to IDE mode. If you are unsure if your controller is running in AHCI mode, just give it a try to proceed with step 7. The worst thing to happen would be Parted Magic being unable to detect any hard drives. In that case, you'll need to switch your controller to IDE mode, which is not covered in this guide. Do a Google search for "how to switch SATA controller to IDE mode".
- Now we've created our bootable media. Insert your CD or plug-in your USB pen drive, and restart your computer. You need to change your boot device in the system's BIOS so the computer will boot from it. The easiest way is to bring up the boot menu by pressing F12 (or the escape key on some systems) when your computer starts, then select your bootable media from the list. Another way is to change the boot order in the BIOS, however this process is not covered in this tutorial. Do a Google search for "how to change the boot order in bios".
- You should see the Parted Magic boot menu. Select option 1 (the default) and press Enter. If you have a system with a small amount of installed memory (RAM), consider using the option "Live with low RAM settings".
- Now you should see the Parted Magic desktop, similar to a Windows desktop. Double click the icon named "Partition Editor" on the desktop to open the partition editor.
- In the bottom pane, you should see a list of your hard drive's partitions. If no partitions are listed and no hard drive is detected, you most probably have forgot to switch your SATA controller to IDE mode (see step 6).
- Right-Click the partition you want to set as the active / bootable partition and select "manage flags". From the following menu, tick the "boot" check box and close the program. Reboot your computer to complete the process. Important note: If you have set the boot partition to a partition which does not contain the system files needed by the boot loader, your system will fail to boot. Do not set a partition as the active partition when no operating system files are installed on it. To do this for Windows XP, read step 5 in the following article: Change the Active Partition in Windows XP
- If your system fails to boot and you want to go back, just return to step 7 and this time, set your old active partition to bootable again with Parted Magic.
