The active partition is the partition which is marked as Active in Index table. the status and locations of partitions are stored in MBR(master boot record). The active status tells the system which partition to boot from. System boots from the partition which contains the Operating System(windows XP, 2003.....). So the partition which contains the Operating System is Active partition and it is the Primary partition.
So we can call the active partition as Bootable Partition or Primary Partition.
The system partition(a partition where the operating system is installed) is the active partition of the Hard Drive
By default C: is the active partition of the hard disk drive
system partition
System partition
active partition
dd
boot partition
A map to the partitions on the hard drive. This table tells BIOS how many partitions the drive has and how each partitions is divided into one or more logical drives, which partition contains the drive to be used for booting (called the active partition), and where each logical drive begins and ends.1-map to the partitions on on the hard drive2-information about where each logical drive is located, where it starts and where it ends3-which partition contains the drive to be used for booting (the active partition)The first is a map to the partitions on the harddrive,and how they are divided, the second, which partition contains the drive to be used for booting this is called the "Active Partition", and third where each logical begin and ends.
Yes you can have the Mac OS on one drive and Windows on another drive. Or you can partition a single hard drive and have both on the same drive.
The system partition is the active partition of the hard drive and it contains the OS boot record. The boot partition is the partition where the Windows operating system is stored.
Most of the time the boot partition and the system partition are the same partition on the drive C.
The area on the hard drive that contains a map to all the partition on the drive is called the partition table. That is what partition utilities edit when you add, delete, convert, or resize a partition.