How to recover Windows partition when an incorrect partition is marked as active in Windows 2000 system

In the Windows systems, the system partition with which the computer system is started is marked as active partition in the boot.ini file. This information is of immense help as this detail is required when the system boots. This practice, sometimes, is not followed if some corruption is found on the hard disk or the partition information is damaged. Because of this, the system is unable to start making all the stored data vulnerable. In such cases, you should perform suitable steps to recover Windows partition by marking the correct partition as active partition. If you are unable to do this, then you should use a third-party Windows partition recovery software to resolve this issue.

Assume a practical situation in which you are unable to start your Windows 2000-based system. In this case, the following error message is displayed:

“Missing Operating System”

Cause:

The root cause of this problem is that the an incorrect partition is marked as active.

Resolution:

To resolve this problem, you should change your computer's active partition. Before doing this, you should create a Boot Disk that contains Fdisk.exe tool. These two stages are explained in the following points:

• Creating a Boot Disk: To create a Boot Disk, you should perform the following steps:

  • On a computer running Windows 98, insert a 3.5 inch floppy disk in the floppy drive.

  • Click Start | Run.

  • In the 'Run' dialog box, type 'command' and click OK. The 'Command Prompt' window will be displayed.

  • Type the following command in the command prompt and press Enter:

format a: /s

• Press Enter three times.

• Type the following command to copy the Fdisk.exe file to the 3.5-inch disk:

copy c:\windows\command\fdisk.exe a:

• Press Enter.

• Close the command prompt window.

• Changing the active partition: To use the Fdisk.exe tool to change the active partition, you should perform the following steps:

  • Insert the floppy disk in the inaccessible Windows 2000 system.

  • Start the computer with the command prompt.

  • At the A;\> prompt, type the following command and press Enter:

fdisk.exe

• Press Enter to enable large disk support.

• In the 'Enter choice' selection, type '2' and press Enter.

• Provide the number of the partition that you want to mark as active and press Enter.

• Press Esc.

• Remove the floppy disk and restart the system.

This resolution method should be able to recover partition in most of similar cases. However, if it is not so then you should use a third-party partition recovery software to recover all the inaccessible data. Highly interactive user interface, which enables even a novice user to recover data, and efficient scanning mechanisms are some of the strong features of these data recovery tools.

The most efficient Windows recovery software that recovers Windows partitions including NTFS, FAT, and exFAT file systems is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery. With the option to recover more than 185 different file types from various storage devices such as hard drives, iPods, memory cards, pen drives, etc, this Windows partition recovery software is capable of recovering deleted emails from Outlook Express and MS Outlook. In addition, this partition recovery software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000.