Installed new HARD drive with the new installation of XP, old HDD ShowAs saw as the active partition, how to change this?

I installed a new HARD drive with a new installation of Windows XP Edition family. I want to keep the old HDD and reformat the drive, but I can't because the second HDD is listed as active in the management of the computer. Why? It's not the drive that contains the operating system (Windows XP) that is initialized from.  I put the BIOS such that the new HARD drive is the boot drive. The old HDD has Windows XP on it, but isn't the startup disk. I just don't understand.
If only the new HARD drive is installed, the computer management doesn't show that it or any other of its partitions are the active partition (C drive is listed as the system partition, of course).

How can I get an active partition and no active partition when the new HARD drive is installed on a HARD drive that is not the boot drive, when I have two hard drives installed?

In case it is necessary, the new HARD drive is a SATA and the old HARD drive is IDE with the cavaliers as a slave.

The system partition is the Active partition. The system volume contains the system files needed to start Windows, Windows XP, these system files are:

NTLDR
Boot.ini
NTDETECT.COM
Ntbootdd.sys (present/used only with older SCSI controllers)

Windows files are not necessarily on the system volume, they can reside on another volume, when on a different volume this volume holding Windows files is called the boot volume.

When you install Windows on a computer, playing a mixture of IDE and SATA setup discs tends to favor with IDE drives on SATA drives and tends to use the IDE drive to house the system partition, (even if Windows is installed on a different drive).

Running the command SYSTEM SET at a command prompt may shed some light on the problem...

John

Tags: Windows

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