I'm running XP Pro sp2 on a Dimension 4400. I recently added an old 2nd HD as a slave which has several partitions on it. The 10 GB Primary on it contains an old damaged version of XP which I do not want, but the other partitions have valuable data that I do want- so I tried to just erase the old windows folder from My Computer-but I cannot access the partition, so I checked it in Disk Management which lists it as healthy and active-I don't know if this is an issue or not as to why I can't gain access to the partition to clean it out. All of the other partitions on it are accessible. I'm not sure if my system is even detecting the old version of windows either-I'm not getting a choice of boot OS at startup. I hope this all makes sense-if not I'll do my best to clarify.

I noticed that when I read the properties of the partition it showed the file system as RAW, and after a bit of Googling, I discovered that others had found that this meant the MFT was damaged and recommended a free disk test and repair utility called TestDisk. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
I used this to repair the MFT and now I am able to access the drive.

Once again, thanks qldit for your helpful suggestions.

All of the partitions on both drives are NTFS (the problem partition has no listing for file system in Disk Mangement, but the old version of windows was XP, so I'm assuming it 's NTFS as well.

I want to keep all the data on other the other partitions (logical drives within an extended partition really) and wipe/reformat the primary one to gain the extra 10 GB it holds. I don't have the installer for the old version of windows anymore so repairing it is not an option. I just want to wipe it out.

BTW, what difference does an "active" drive make?

First off, Thank you for your assistance. I was remiss in not acknowledging it in the previous post. I think it is really great that people will take up there free time to offer strangers advice & aid.

OK, I will consider that as a last resort, because there is 70 gigs of data there now. I like to have several partitions on disks for scratch disks and archives of fonts, etc-just a personal preference. I'm holding onto the hope that there may be an easier way to deal with this, and I'm also curious as to what the root problem is-I've never experienced anything like it.

BTW, I don't know if this makes a difference-I tried accessing it by CMD line and got "parameter is incorrect".

If "active" means that it is seen as possibly bootable, does that mean that my system may be protecting it from interference from within this OS? There was a small partition on my Laptop that held the DELL diagnostics that was unable to be accessed from XP. Is there a way via Disk Management or some other resource within windows to designate the offending partition as non-bootable?