unmark a disk as active

I have two Seagate 160 Gb HD's both were in different computers and had partitions set as active running XP, I've since gotten a new computer and installed both HD's into the old one. problem is if both disks are hooked up I cannot get the windows CD to install, it says there is a disk configuration error and will not run.
I have gotten XP installed on one disk set as master , but it will not load if both drives are installed, I've deleted the partitions, formatted the drive, and reinstalled as slave, but it STILL tries to boot from the disk with no OS, I've changed the settings in BIOS , still no joy.
Installed the drive into another computer as slave, where incidentally it does let windows start (from another disk),tried to format again(from within windows) it gets almost to the end and says disk format failed.
In disk management it shows the disk listed as ACTIVE primary, is there any way to change that so I can use it in the other computer?

 

What is the problem? any ideas?

 

If the drive has issues in two computers (if i read that right), I would try a chkdsk /r on it to see if it comes up with unrecoverable errors.

From a cmd.exe prompt, type chkdsk /r D: or whatever drive letter it is, in the computer that can see it properly.