Windows 10: Active partition

i am trying to set an active partition but my computer shows 7 partitions. How do I know what one to set as active?

:)

 

Error: We couldn’t update the system reserved partition

You will note in your earlier post the screen shot of you partition arrangement. The System partition is marked as System and Active. If you copied the contents of this partition to another partition that partition must be marked as System and Active.

1) You first need to remove the System / Active from your original EFI System partition.

2) Then highlight the new partition you copied the boot configuration files to as "System' and 'Active'.

 

Disk Management and setting partition Active

The only reason for marking a partition as "Active" is to boot from it. If the partition doesn't contain an OS, there's no reason for it to be active.

 

if you use this tutorial ... Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Ten Forums - Windows 10 Forums to post a screen shot of your partition layout in Disk manager or other application (expand as far as possible or take multiple screen shots so that all information is available)

 

Welcome to the forum. Active means it's the one it boots from and has the system files most often in windows it's called system reserved very small 120meg post a screenshot of disk manager if in doubt

 

Most but not all Windows have a System Reserved partition - mark that Active. If no SysRes, then mark partition containing Windows Active.

 

I tried to make the "reserved" partition active and it says the selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk??

 

I am simply trying to reset my computer but when I try it says "a required drive partition is missing". Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way.

 

As Barman asked earlier, are you able to post a pic of your hard-drive structure as given by Disk Management?

 

I think this is what was asked for

 

You have a GPT partitioned disk booting from UEFI. It won't have an active partition. The active partition is for MBR partitioned disks booting from legacy BIOS. The required partition missing is the recovery partition which is not set properly in the Windows Recovery Environment.

Right click on the start icon, select the Command Prompt (Admin). In the elevated command prompt window that opens, run:

reagentc /info

You should get a result like:

Code: C:\WINDOWS\system32>reagentc /info Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration Information: Windows RE status: Enabled Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition1\Recovery\WindowsRE Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: fcaab80d-8717-11e6-843d-aa73efa5da58 Recovery image location: Recovery image index: 0 Custom image location: Custom image index: 0 REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.[/quote] Post your results here and we can help more.

 

The system reset option is looking for a .wim file (probably install.wim?) in the preload folder of partition 7 on your hard drive. The problem is that you don't have 7 partitions on your hard drive, you only have 6. So, you have a couple options. The first question is what do you want to reset your computer to and why? Do you want a fresh install of Windows 10? The easy way to do that would be to download a Windows 10 ISO file, save it to a USB thumb drive (at least 4 GB, 8 GB is better, formatted as NTFS), then do the upgrade repair install.

Windows 10 ISO Download - Windows 10 Forums

Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade - Windows 10 Forums

If you want to reset your computer back to factory installed software - hopefully on of the partitions on your hard drive is the old partition 7. You will want to install MiniTool Partition Wizard free:
Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free

Right click on each of the partitions, especially the recovery partitions, and select browse. You are looking for the partition with the preload folder in it, that hopefully contains a .wim file. Then you will have to reset the partition that Windows RE is looking for the recovery image file in. In the command prompt (admin) window run:

REAGENTC.EXE /setosimage /path \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partitionX /index 4

Replace the red X above with the partition number you find the preload folder in. Partitions start at the number 1. That should enable the reset command from work from the Windows Recovery Environment menu.

OH....there is also this from Microsoft:
Start fresh with a clean installation of Windows