How do you remove an active partition flag without deleting the partition? I built a new computer and want to use an older drive from an old computer. This drive also contains an XP install. It is marked active as C: on the old system. So obviously when I try and boot it as primary slave in my new box it fails. I can see both drives fine from dos. When I go into fdisk, it flashes unable to acess drive 1 when I attempt to switch fixed disks. How can I delete the A partition flag on drive 2 without losing the data? thanks, Mike

I don't think you should have to remove the Active Partition "flag". Since you say you cannot see the disk from FDISK, can you see it in the BIOS? I'd suggest that you check the jumper settings and cable settings as well as the BIOS settings to make sure you have it setup correctly. Since you can't see it in the FDISK utility it makes me think you've got a configuration issue unrelated to the active partition (you don't have too many partitions do you?). Have you tried rebuilding the master boot record from the XP CD (I'm assuming you don't want to use the second drive as an OS drive anymore)....