Windows 10: How do I change the designation of a drive from active to inactive?

I've been told that my data drive is active. How do I change it to inactive status?

:)

 

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MSN weather

 

how do I change the city designation in the weather app?

Which weather app?

 

What are you trying to accomplish? Are you referring to a hard drive or a USB stick? If the former, I'm not sure what you mean to accomplish by marking inactive. If the latter, do you mean making it inactive so you can remove it? If so, you can right click the USB icon in the systray and eject the drive.

 

I use a separate hard drive for my data. It is currently "active" which, I believe, Windows 10 can utilize it. By marking it inactive, I prevent Windows from placing data on it. Check out your own drives using Disk Management and you should see the word "active" on the drive that holds your OS.

 

The only thing the active flag does is mark that partition as a possible boot partition for MBR partitioned drives on legacy BIOS computers (or UEFI computers set to boot in legacy BIOS or CSM mode).

To remove the active flag, open Command Prompt (Admin) then:

diskpart
list disk
select disk # <- replace # with the disk number of the drive you think has the active partition
list part
select part # <- replace # with the partition you think is active
inactive
exit
exit

If you get the wrong partition # and inactive gives you an error, just select another partition using select part #. The only damage you can do with the inactive command is to run it on the partition the computer is really booting from, and the computer won't boot until you boot from a USB flash drive and mark that partition as active again.

 

I think OP is confusing making a drive active with making a drive offline.

The latter is easy and can be done from disk management by right click clicking on drive.

 

No. He wants to remove the active flag from the data partition on drive 1:

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So it looks like it would be:

diskpart
select disk 1
select part 1
inactive
exit
exit

 

But he said " By marking it inactive, I prevent Windows from placing data on it" and active or not is not going to do that.

 

Just an observation from a 3rd party with some questions. What happens to the drive if OP makes secondary drive inactive? Will this in any way prevent a user from using the drive at all? Are there any pro's to making a drive in active?

 

Only problem with it set active is that in case of windows reinstall it may mistake second drive for primary one. There's no reason for active partition other the one with OS on it.

 

That makes sense....thanks.

 

This is what he said in post 3

I use a separate hard drive for my data. It is currently "active" which, I believe, Windows 10 can utilize it. By marking it inactive, I prevent Windows from placing data on it. Check out your own drives using Disk Management and you should see the word "active" on the drive that holds your OS.

 

Actually, I just noticed that Drive 1 partition is also marked as the "system" partition which means that is where the computer IS booting from. Not drive 0. So we don't know if any of the partitions on drive 0 actually contain useable boot files or not!

 

Here's the latest view of my DM. I have made Disk 1 inactive and the dual boot seems to work fine. See anything wrong?