A couple of days ago I discovered errors from one disk in event viewer and figured out it was the IDE drive (HD0 as ID'd in Disk manager). This was a disk I added 4 years ago as a storage disk when I had a one disk system. The system disk is HD1 and is SATA. I have 3 other SATA drives added since for a total of 5HDD. I checked the IDE disk with Seatools snd the disk failed short and long tests. I ran XP’s checkdisk and it tried to correct it but I think there were too many errors in the MBR. There is nothing important on the drive as I had been getting ready to swap it out anyway. I tried to delete the partitions and reformat to see if that could make the disk useable again. Here is the problem. I deleted the second smaller partition, but it wouldn’t let me delete the first partition and kept telling me that the “active” disk was being used and if I deleted the active disk, it could cause a problem. In Disk manager, the problem drive is listed as healthy (active). My C drive with Windows (which is still the original windows install) on it is listed as Healthy (system). I have no other active partitions. After doing research on Healthy (system) and Healthy (active), I’m confused. I don’t want to screw up my system by messing with the active partition. Again the problem disk has no important data, but it appears the computer is using it for something Options: Can I just remove the problem disk and every will be fine? Is there a way to make the bad disk inactive and reformat it? Or is it just fried? Do I need to make one of my other disks active? What happens if I do? All my searches on healthy (active) seem to link to people trying to recover data or who have a disk missing a drive drive letter. It is true that I can see the info still on the problem disk, but I can't actually reach it. Regardless, I don't need it. Any help is greatly appreciated!

mas99, can't answer your query as I simply dunno. Perhaps a viable (and easily reversible) way to find out is to physically remove (unplug) the drive and give booting a try. If it has a 'must' file, you'll soon know or ... HTH. Ed in Texas.

It could easily be be that your "problem" drive is being used, without your knowing it. Windows may keep its System Restore info there, for a start. I don't use the second partition on this laptop, but there's around 65MB of system files in a hidden folder. You might try Partition Magic or a similar utility. Regards Kris