Active Partition
A bootable partition is a section of a storage device, such as a hard drive or SSD, that contains an operating system or bootloader, allowing the computer to start up from that partition. It is typically formatted with a file system that the BIOS or UEFI can recognize, enabling the system to load the necessary files for booting. In some cases, multiple bootable partitions can exist on a single drive, allowing users to select different operating systems at startup. Proper configuration and setup are essential for a partition to be recognized as bootable.
sda1 is normally the one. It indicates the first disk's first patrition. if you have more than one disk or you put the system into, for example, the second disk's first patrition. Then the mbr will guide it to boot from sdb1.
The system disk is the partition from which the operating system was loaded at startup.
Yes, you can have two bootable operating systems on the same hard drive by creating separate partitions for each OS. During installation, each operating system can be set up to reside on its own partition, allowing you to choose which one to boot at startup. This is often managed using a bootloader, such as GRUB or the Windows Boot Manager, which facilitates selecting the desired OS during boot. Just ensure that your system meets the requirements for both operating systems.
press on startup to display the bootable disks.
A PC going through its booting sequence upon staring, a personal computer's CPU runs the instruction located at the memory location of the Basic Input/ Output System (BIOS). It contains a jump instruction that transfer execution to the location of the BIOS startup program. This program runs a Power On Self Test to check that devices the computer rely on are functioning; it also initializes these devices. Then the BIOS go through a preconfigured list of devices until it finds one that is bootable. If the BIOS find a bootable device, it loads and executes its boot sector. In the case of a hard drive, this is referred to as the master boot record (MBR) and is often not operating system specific. Usually MBR code checks the partition table for an active portion. If one is found, the MBR code loads that partition's boot sector and executes it. The boot sector is often operating system specific, however in most operating systems its main function is to load and execute the kernel, which continues startup and in the case of multi-user operating systems prompt the login screen.
(On Windows), the active partition is a primary partition on a disk which Windows will load its files from. An active partition is always a startup partition. If there are several OS's on the one disk, Windows will load from the one marked as active. - pentavore
You must have IO.sys, Msdos.sys and command.com
My Computer, right click on floppy drive-> Format... In the next windows choose Create a MS-DOS startup disk
It is checking to see if a bootable disk (i.e. windows startup disk) is inserted. Obviously, if it didn't check + your computer didn't work then you wouldn't be able to use your startup disk.
Built into Mac OS X is an application called Disk Utility, which can format and partition any internal or external volume. It's located in /Applications/Utilities/. Additionally, there are some third-party utilities that can work with partitions on-the-fly: iPartition, DiskWorks, and VolumeWorks all claim to do this.
wow this happens to me alot you have to either press F12 or F11 when it says no bootable devices and then move to the section that shows what bootable devices there are and screw around a little and switch what order things boot and after a few it should work i dont know what type of laptop it is exactly you have so i dont know what exactly the devices you have on it