Hard drive Partitions(long)

[Bleep]

Posted this on a couple of BBS's and no answer hope better luck here.
I came into a machine that has a 3 gig maxtor HD. C= 270 Megs. D=rest of drive. I have never used a HD with multiple partitions and need help. I do not want to redo the C drive as this machine has all the slots full of Legacy cards and do not have the drivers for them.
?1 The D Part must be active because I loaded some info on it but cannot run a program from it.
?2 When I loaded a game on D it put some of the info on the C drive is normal?
?3 Can I do away with the D drive making the drive all C without redoing the OS
?4 This machine has win 3.11 on C And not enough room to do a win 95 upgrade.
?5 If I Just put the OS on D and forget C how do I change the Boot To D instead of C
Thanks all
Bleep

[beck]

1. The D drive is an extended/logical partition. You don't have to make it active, it's just kind of there. What do you mean exactly that you can't run a program?
2. Yes, that's pretty normal in Windows of any version and programs written for them.
3. Maybe. You'd need a tool like Partition Magic to try it.
5. Unless D is a primary partition, or you have a boot manager, you can't boot from it.

How is this disk set up? Does the bios see the whole drive or do you have to use one of the large disk programs? What does fdisk show for each of the partitions?

[BBA]

You should run fdisk and select the option to view the drives partitions. It will tell you which partition is set active and give file system usage of the drive. You can also set the c drive active with it if it is not already.

[smokin1]

beck is right, it is all the same drive..if you are wanting to upgrade to win 95 you have 2 choices...format c: only and install the upgrade there ..
if there is nothing you can't replace on the drive just run fdisk and delete the extended partition then delete the primary extention, then create one big partition to use the whole drive if the bios supports it. Then while still in fdisk make your new partition active. If you are installing win95 boot to a prompt with a win95 boot disc with cd support and format the drive..then install the new OS.
Your c: drive is the only partition that can be active with the setup you currently have.
Hope this answers your question
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[Bleep]

Thanks guys:
Good advice all. Got it going, not quite sure what I did but got it figured out with your help.
Bleep