The boot partition
boot partition
(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
The system partition(a partition where the operating system is installed) is the active partition of the Hard Drive
Active partition is a term Windows uses to mean the partition Windows will boot off of. The Windows boot loader goes to its configuration file and starts, these files will be in the active partition.
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.
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.
Must be at least a 2 GB partition. System partition.
In a Windws PC, a sysem partition contains hardware level details of the hard disk and other partitions. It contains files that tell the Bios where to look for the boot loader, hence all disks must always have a system partition.A boot partition is any bootable partition in your hard drive that contains an Operating system or a bootable utility.The active Prtition in your case is the partition that contains the boot loader (Most cases the partition that contains the first installation of windows) inyour case windows 2000.This s also the System Partition not the boot partition
There are two types of partitions:Primary partition: A primary partition is used to store (and boot) an operating system. You can store user data and applications here, as well. You can have up to four (4) primary partitions on one hard disk drive (HDD) at one time, but only one of those four can be labeled as an active partition (look below).Active partition: An active partition is a partition that has an operating system installed on it and is used to boot your machine. If you have one primary partition, then it's labeled as "active." If you have more than one primary partition, then only one of them is labeled as "active" in a single PC session.
By default C: is the active partition of the hard disk drive
On clicking on the control panel, type partition in the search box and the links for partitioning will appear in Windows 7. In case of Windows 8x the search can be done at the Start screen search.
Set the primary partition containing Windows XP to active