ACTIVATE(E)                                           ACTIVATE(E)



NAME
       activate - read/write flags marking active boot partition

SYNOPSIS
       /sbin/activate device
       show which partition is currently marked active on device
       /sbin/activate device partition
       mark specified partition as active on given device

DESCRIPTION
       activate  is  a  simple  program  which sets the partition
       which will be used to boot the system. To be  precise,  it
       sets  a flag in the partition table of the hard disk. This
       may or may not have an effect on the bootup procedure.  PC
       booting  is  complicated,  and  this  manual page does not
       attempt to explain it; for more information on what parti-
       tion  you  should set active, you should consult the docu-
       mentation for your bootloader (an  example  bootloader  is
       lilo,  which  has a good manual in /usr/share/doc/lilo/ on
       Debian systems).

       Note that programs such as fdisk will also  allow  you  to
       set the active partition; it is probably better to use one
       of these, since they generally provide  services  such  as
       allowing  you  to  view the partition table before picking
       which partition to activate, and  provide  opportunity  to
       confirm  actions  before  writing  to the partition table.
       However, these programs have  more  checking  for  'wrong'
       values;  for instance, they might not allow you to set the
       active flag on an extended partition (because this is gen-
       erally  a bad idea).  activate, on the other hand, assumes
       you really do know what you're doing and doesn't have  any
       bothersome prompts or sanity checks.  In particular, acti-
       vate makes no checks that the device you give has a parti-
       tion  table on it at all!  If you specify the wrong device
       it will happily write garbage to it.


OPTIONS
       device should be a block device  such  as  /dev/hda.  Note
       that  it  does not make sense to give one of the partition
       devices such as /dev/hda3.

       partition should be a number between 1  and  4  specifying
       which partition should have the active flag set.

       If  no  partition number is given, activate will print out
       the partition which is currently marked active.

BUGS
       activate should check that the device actually has a  par-
       tition table on it.


AUTHOR
       Werner Almesberger (almesber@bernina.ethz.ch).
       Peter Maydell (pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk) wrote this
       manual page.

SEE ALSO
       lilo(o), fdisk(k)

       lilo comes with extensive documentation; this can be found
       in /usr/share/doc/lilo/ on Debian systems.



                            March 1998                ACTIVATE(E)