This question relates to Drive image 7 but anyone with ghost 9/10 experience can help because I believe the feature was retained in Ghost:

Took hard drive out of PC A and put it into a USB enclosure.

Plugged enclosure into PC B (where drive image program resides) and created an image which I saved on PC B

Took a new drive and put it into enclosure - plugged enclosure into PC B and restored the image to the new drive

Put new drive into PC A - would not boot.

My question:
What exactly does the "set drive active" option do. I believe I need this to make the new drive a boot drive, but since the documentation says "only one drive can be active at a time" I wanted to make sure I would not be altering the configuration on my main PC (PC B) by selecting that option. The drive will not boot up in the 2nd machine (PC A) currently and I believe it is because I did not select that option when I layed the image on the new drive.

PS - I was able to clone the drive fine with Ghost 2003 without worrying about any other settings, but I just want to understand when to/not to use the set drive active parameter.

Setting a partition to active tells BIOS that it should read the partition boot record on that partition in order to find the operating system to boot from.  Essentially, you are telling the computer to boot from that partition.

So I would need to set the partition as active when i restored the image?  (I would have thought this would have been done automatically like in Ghost)

Also, By setting the partition as active I would not be altering the settings on my computer.

ajcstr,

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/structActive-c.html

An old article but it explains  "active partition".

Yes, to make the OS bootable you must tick "Set drive active". As you are restoring from the Recovery Environment you will remove the HD from the system prior to the next Windows boot.

However you can make the OS on PC A active now with a Boot Magic floppy or CD, Partition Magic floppies or CD, BootItNG floppy or CD or others I can't think of at present.

ajcstr wrote on Jul 25^th, 2006 at 6:21pm:

Also, By setting the partition as active I would not be altering the settings on my computer.

No, this will not change any settings inside Windows.  It only helps the computer determin where Windows is at.