Can't make the partition active

[Jonty]

Win 98fe, C: drive is an old 12gb Bigfoot as primary master on the IDE1 on the motherboard, and D: drive is a new 80gb Maxtor on a Promise controller card. I had the Maxtor with just one big 80gb partition for the past couple of months since buying it.

OK, the plan was to make the Maxtor the boot drive and I have spent a very hot afternoon repartitioning it in readiness.

The Bigfoot has just one primary partition using the whole 12gb. I've now partitioned the Maxtor with a 20gb primary partition and then 3 logical partitions of 20gb each which are residing in the extended partition. I then did the xcopy thing with the hickery switches and it copied every single file and folder over , I have checked and the two drives were identical. I then did the c: \sys d: thing and also fdisk \mbr.

The problem now is when I try to make the Maxtor primary partition active using fdisk. A message keeps coming up 'Only partitions on drive 1 (the Bigfoot drive) can be made active'.

How am I supposed to make the new drive partition active? I know I need to alter the boot sequence in the BIOS to make it A,SCSI,C but I need to make the partition active first!

[Jonty]

Now looking at this would it mean that I would have to disconnect the Bigfoot drive, so that The Maxtor drive would become C:? Then it would probably let me set the partition as active then.

I know you can only have one active partition on the system, but when I've been reading articles and posts about the xcopy procedure they don't say anything about disconnecting drives to enable the partition to be set active, they just goes on to say that activating a new partition would just remove the old active partition automatically.

[Bill in SD, CA]

If I'm reading this right, (I just woke up) you need to make the maxtor the master and the bigfoot the slave.

Bill

[Jonty]

Hi Bill, I think you are right.

I want to leave my Maxtor on the Promise card because of it's speed and leave the Bigfoot on the motherboard IDE as it is only ata33. The Maxtor is jumpered as cable select at the end of the ribbon cable at present and the Bigfoot master on the primary master cable. If I jumper the Bigfoot as slave and put it on the primary slave cable, leave the Maxtor as cable select on the Promise, then change the BIOS boot sequence to A,SCSI,C will I then be able to set the Maxtors primary partition to active?

I also found this http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;166172 - it's exactly want I want to do with the drives and data, I may give this a go when the weather cools down, it's so hot here!