I recently installed Vista from scratch. I have three drives in my rig. Two of them were empty at the time of install. The other had all of my junk on it.
Post install, I fired up Disk Management to change drive letters and whatnot, as I wanted the drive with all of my junk on it to be my D drive. I had my C drive with Vista on it, my D drive which was empty, and my E drive which had my junk.
Well, Disk Management had:
My C drive marked as: Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition.
My D Drive: (empty disk): System, Active, Primary Partition
My E Drive: Primary Partition.
Due to my D drive being marked as System, I wasn't able to reassign a different drive letter to it. In fact, Vista wouldn't let me do anything to it, besides disabling it. I did disable it, and was able to then assign D to my drive with all of my junk on it.
Upon re-enabling the drive, it was assigned E, and is still marked as System, Active, Primary Partition. I also did mark my C drive as Active, which didn't accomplish anything.
I want to make this drive, now marked E, my P drive that will host my Page File. However, since it's marked as System, I can't do anything. I can't change drive letters. I can't format it. I can't delete the volume. Every time I try and do one of these things, Vista replies with "Windows cannot (the action) the system partition on this disk."
How can I make my C drive my "System" drive, so I can then manipulate my blank E drive? Also, why is this E drive marked as System anyways, as I installed Vista on my C drive?