W520 active partition changed from lenovo 100MB internal to C: with Windows. Can't boot windows.

Hello!
I moved active system partition in diskmgmt.msc from lenovo 100MB internal partition (actually I'm not sure with the default size of the partition it migth be 1000MB or so I just remember visually digits, but I quess the partition is 100MB) to my C: partition. In result I can not boot up my system. All I can do after turning on notebook is to enter the bios.
I didn't remove lenovo partition I just clicked RMB on my C: partition in diskmgmt.msc and made it active. After reboot I can not load windows any longer.
How can I restore lenovo partition to be active?
Got Windows 7 64 bit.
Thanks in advance for any ideas
Kindest Pawel
P.S. I'am writing on Lenovo T400 which doesn't contain that lenovo internal partition, so I'm even more confused what is the purpose of it, maybe for security reasons or so...
Solved!
Go to Solution.

The "active" partition is where Boot Manager lives. The BIOS goes to the "active" partition to start the boot process, i.e. to launch Boot Manager which may utilize a boot manager menu to select which OS you want to boot to, if you have more than one bootable OS installed in multiple partitions. The boot manager menu also resides in this "active" partition.
If you install Windows7 from scratch on an empty drive, by default it will create a 100MB "system reserved" partition (i.e. the "active" partition, and which does NOT get a drive letter assigned to it when Windows comes up), along with a second large system partition for Windows itself (i.e. what you see as C). The entire rest of the drive is allocated to C by default, if you don't make any changes at cold install time.
So although it's possible to relocate Boot Manager and the boot manager menu into that large C partition (corresponding to changing that partition to be "active" and also de-activating the small "system reserved" partition which is no longer going to be used to begin the boot process), that is NOT the way the Windows installer builds things. And it's NOT the way Lenovo delivers the factory setup.
The Lenovo "system_reserved" partition from Lenovo is actually about 1.4GB rather than the usual 100MB. In it Lenovo places other utilities which get utilized during the system recovery process (which also uses the third partition Lenovo puts on the drive, i.e. the "recovery" partition). This is what allows you to truly recreate the factory-provided original hard drive steup if you need to or want to.
Anyway, it is possible to relocate the Boot Manager files into the C-partition if you had a true retail Windows 7 installation DVD. You could run "system repair" (rather than "install") three times in succession, and this would accomplish the deed. There are also utilities like EasyBCD which can relocate Boot Manager into the C-partition. Both of these processes would then allow you to delete the original "system reserved" partition (either the small 100MB one from MS, or the 1.4GB one from Lenovo... realizing of course that you would then lose the ability to use the "recovery partition" to restore Lenovo factory setup).
Also, if you install Windows 7 as a second bootable OS on a drive where WinXP was already installed, the Win7 installer would NOT create a "system reserved" (active) partition, as the existing WinXP partition is already marked as "active" and is where the current Boot Manager (from WinXP) lives. The Win7 installer replaces this (in the WinXP system partition itself, which is left untouched as the "active" partition) with the Win7 Boot Manager and menu, and creates a separatte new partition with Win7 in it. So now you have two bootable OS's, and no small "system reserved", and the WinXP partition contains Win7 Boot Manager and 2-OS boot menu, and is the "active" partition where the BIOS goes to start the boot process.
But honestly, there is really no reason to do any of the above with your W520. Just stick with what came from Lenovo. Some partition on the boot drive MUST be marked "active", and that's where Boot Manager and its menu MUST reside. Who cares whether that's in a small separate partition (which doesn't get a letter anyway), or in C? There's really very little to gain from changing this, other than a very small amount of additional hard drive space becoming "usable".

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