HP PC Used F11 for HP Recovery Mgr, Partition made Active by ASZ Now Unbootable

1. My HP PC's F11 was set up for HP Recovery Manager on startup. If Acronis Startup Recovery Manager also using F11 is activated, what would happen? Can both be retained?

2. From setting up an Acronis Secure Zone (ASZ) on the bulk of a second internal pull-tray hard drive (slave) both from WinVista and from product installation CD, ASZ marked the original primary partition active. I then deleted ASZ but that didn't unmark the partition, so now when I need to include the drive in a normal boot, I got a message of MBR missing and can't get to the Vista-XP dual-boot screen. How can I unmark this active partition now? What is the right way to unmark it in the first place?

3. Another HDD (actually the first drive I messed up worse) with the same problem above except ASZ was from Vista, then deleted ASZ; as partition still active afterwards, deleted that partition, tried to reformat it but can't;
then as I have a DriveWorks floppy usable in another Win98 PC, I used DriveWorks to reformat and recreate the partition but can't get the full capacity of the HDD;
then moved HDD from pull-tray to USB external enclosure, plug back into Vista PC but Win Disk Manager first can't recognize the HDD, later can but can't initialize it with message of Disk not ready.
Can this HDD (content losable here) be saved and the formerly ASZ-occupied space be regained?

4. In the process above with the Win98 PC, as I haven't used VCom DriveWorks for quite a while, I accidentally deleted the rightfully active system volumn in the PC's original HDD, which made it unbootable now. I removed the HDD into USB external enclosure, plug it into the Vista PC but Win Disk Manager needs to initialize it first, which would wipe out the active system I want there, right?
Is there a way to recover that system volumn (content critical here)? Is there any version of Disk Director on bootable CD?

Please help! If it's impossible, can someone let me know, please?