Disk Management Question

faridc

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Dec 21, 2013
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I was looking at the disk management tool and wanted to understand a few things about active/inactive, primary partitions...etc.

I have 2 SSD's and 1 internal HDD and 1 external HDD arranged as follow:
Disk 0 (S): internal HDD or storage drive exclusively for data
Disk 1 (C): SSD or Windows OS
Disk 2 (G): SSD or game drive for retail and Steam games.
Disk 3 (T): is an external HDD for back up.

So, I was looking at the disk management and was trying to understand the different disgnations for all my drives. This is how it looks like:

DiskManagement_zps8eba0bdd.jpg
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Why does Storage Drive (S) show up as 'System, Active', but not the Windows OS Drive (C)?
Would this affect the proper/optimal functioning of my whole PC? So far I have not noticed anything unusual.

Thank you for any info you provide.

 
I have a guess. My guess is that when you installed Windows (what version?) on the SSD, the SSD was not the only drive attached to the system. Disk 0 was attached to the system during the OS install.

If that was the case, then some versions of Windows (I'm most familiar with 7 doing this) will put the bootloader on some drive other than the one that you are installing the OS to. If Disk 0 was empty at the time you did this, and if the installed OS were win7, I'd expect to see a 100 MB partition on Disk 0, though.

So, a few questions to clarify things for me.
1) What version of the OS are you running?
2) Did you install it on that SSD yourself?
3) Which other drives were physically attached to the system when you did the install?
4) Did Disk 0 used to have an operating system installed on it? Or were all the disks new when you did the OS install?
 

faridc

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Thanks for your answer.
Some clarification:
1- OS: win 8.1
2 and 3- yes, i did. I had hooked up all the drives at the same time. the 2 SSD's and the HDD.
4- disk 0 (HDD) did have an OS on it, but i thought i had deleted any partition and formatted it prior to making it the storage drive.

Some stuff I learned since this post.
The SATA headers are marked 0,1, 2, ...etc. I think the HDD is connected to the SATA 0.
I should have connected the OS drive first, installed windows, then connected the others.
But you don't think it affects the overall performance of the system, right?
 
There will be a very slight increase in boot time.

BUT. The system will not boot without both the data disk and the SSD present. If the data disk dies, the system will not boot. There are a few ways to fix this, from a repair install to make the SSD bootable to the draconian measure of reinitilizing the data drive, removing the three non-system disks, formatting your SSD, and doing a re-install. If you care, we can discuss options.
 

faridc

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Good to know about both disks being present to boot the system.
I'm expecting a new mobo in the next few days, so I'll be upgrading my system soon.
I will definitely make sure only the OS drive (SSD) is connected before re-installing windows.
My storage drive will be backed up to an external drive and it will be formatted.
I'll make sure all the 'booting' is done by the OS drive.
Again, thanks for your insight, that was very helpful.
 
Formatting won't turn off the active flag or touch the boot record. You'll have to re-initialize the drive, a lower-level action. As long as the bootable ssd is on SATA port zero, you should never have a problem with two bootable drives in the system.