I had my 500GB external hard drive hooked up to my dell dimension.I was trying to partition this.I went into my computer management/disk management.I then saw disk 1(marked:F drive) and disk 0 (marked :C drive)in the disk management window.I went and right click the External :F drive and comanded the computer to mark partion as active how do i deactivate this?.I am pretty sure what i did was not right and want to make sure i am not screwing up my computer.I was try to split my new 500GB HD into two.

Marking a drive active or inactive only has any relevance if the drive is a primary partition and is bootable. You can make a non-bootable partition active but then if it is the first primary partition in the system it wont boot. As drive C: is the first active partition then it makes no difference. To split the 500GB drive into two using Disk Management you are going to have to delete the existing partition and then create two new ones of 250MBs each. Of course you will lose any data on the drive. If there is data you want to keep you are going to have to use a third party partition manager like Partition Magic and shrink the existing partition to make room for another. Stuart

You will need to set c: as active before you reboot or you will not reboot into windows. If you find yourself in this situation a boot diskette or cd containing latest version of fdisk will allow you to fix which partition is active. Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search