Active partition issue, "BOOTMGR missing!"

It was a terrible weekend, when my computer failed to start after a partitioning session on my "external" hard drive. Weird! When the partitioning was over, I knew clicking a dialog box without reading its contents properly. I barely remember that was something related to confirmation for an "active partition". As my conscience directed, immediately did a Google search to see what an active partition is. The results told me that if active partition is wrongly set, the computer won’t boot. Checked the windows partition using the Disk management snap-in and it was not set as active. Quickly set all the three system partitions, C:, System Reserved and Recovery as active partitions and re-booted the PC.

Oops! BOOTMGR is missing! System won’t start. Doomed!

Fortunately I had my recovery disk created some time back and tried to boot from that. System booted and Recovery console opened. Did a System repair and re-booted. No, it didn't boot. Again the same error was reported. Checked about active partition issues using Google on my smart phone (how good to have a smart phone, I love it). So finally found a step by step procedure for recovering from an active partition issue. It is as below.

Launch command prompt from the recovery console and type the following commands.

DISKPART

Diskpart prompt will appear

LIST DISK

Note Disk number of the disk on which windows is installed. On a windows only machine, mostly it will be '0'.

SELECT DISK 0

LIST PARTITION

Note windows partition and use it in place of # in the following command

SELECT PARTITION #

ACTIVE

EXIT

The following screenshot explains.

That's it. Now reboot. No, again BOOTMGR missing! What happened?

OK, most of the pre-installed Windows 7 machines, there are two hidden partitions other than C:, namely, recovery and system reserved as given in the below screenshot.

Which one has to be set active? That was confusion. If I set anything randomly as active and if the recovery disk itself is not getting detected, what am I supposed to do?

Again back to Google. No solution found.

Took the risk of playing around to set the recovery as well as system reserved partitions as active as explained above. When I checked the partition details, I was able to see that only the system reserved partition is active and recovery partition is inactive. So at any point of time only one partition can be active. If one is set active, the others go inactive.

So now, set C: as active and rebooted. Voila! It worked. Now the computer is running fine. So in the process the missing bit is "set the windows partition, say C:, as active" and even with a single drive, in windows 7, there will be two additional hidden partitions - Recovery and System Reserved. The one that needs to be active is your C: and no other.

Here is a full account of things to be done to recover a system from such a situation.

Use recovery disk to boot.

Get into command prompt from the recovery console.

Invoke Diskpart and set the windows partition to active.

Type Exit to close diskpart and exit again to exit the command window.

Remove the recovery disk from the optical drive and reboot.

That’s it.

Internet Parental Controls

Last week, I met my friend, who told me that her 6 year old daughter has registered her name in a gaming website with her e-mail id !!

Yesterday, I logged into an educational games website for my son and was shocked to see him watching a video of 'Iron man', after sometime!!!

It's getting more and more difficult to leave kids online. Launch a 'normal' website and you can see a lot of ads poping up or appear inline, including ads with adult content! Get into 'You Tube' to watch a video, all related/unrelated videos line up in the sides. It's just a matter of clicks for kids.

Internet has become the buzzword of the current generation. It has turned to be an inevitable need. But like every new technology, it has its own pros and cons. How do we safeguard our children from the 'cons' without losing the 'pros'?

Parental controls come to our rescue.

I'll explain here how to do it on a Windows based PC.

First and foremost step is to set up a separation user account for your child.

Go to Control Panel --> User Accounts and Family Safety --> Parental controls and turn it on for your children's id.

This only provides a basic control. For advanced options, Windows Live Family Safety is the way. However this needs a Microsoft provided id, like Hotmail, Windows Live etc. and is less effective as this is a web based tool. Parental controls provided by anti virus/internet security software are more effective and reliable. The below steps explain how to set up parental control in Kaspersky Internet security suite.

• Open Kaspersky Internet Security and click Parental control.

• Select your child's account and the below screen appears.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Now you see a list that you can setup. The below screen shows how to block websites of some category and also specify exclusions. Depending on your child's age, you can decide on the categories to be blocked.

• The below is internet usage, where you can set a download data limit and time limit.
  
  
  
  
  
• You can also control File downloads.

It's done now ! Similar setup could be done with other antivirus internet security software except for slight variations in the setup.

Setup is done.. But don't you still want to monitor your child's activity for the day? Here you go..

Reports option provides a detailed browsing data of your child.

There are other reports for checking the file downloading, internet usage etc..

What else ? Setup Parental controls and let your child explore the internet world safely !!