# How Many Active Partitions can be on One Hard Drive?



## 2048Megabytes (May 28, 2010)

I had the following the question on a practice test.  I think the answer is wrong.  The question is the following:

How many active partitions can be made on the hard drive of a computer?

They put the answer as one.  I say the answer is four.  

What if you had the computer set up to load one of four operating systems in a quad-boot?  You would have four active partitions on one hard drive wouldn't you?


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## StrangleHold (May 28, 2010)

You can have four primary partitions but only one active.


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## tyttebøvs (May 28, 2010)

The boot strap code in your MBR will load the boot sector from whatever partition set as active. So if you were to have more than one active partition then what?

If you manually set the active flag on more than one partition, you will get an error message when trying to boot.


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