For what it's worth - I have found that even if my partition is RAW, when I have gone to install XP it has still recognised the partition and then formatted to NTFS in the process of the installation.
There should be a way to check the flags, I think by right clicking on the partition itself. That should bring up a list of check boxes with possible flags; just look for the one that says "Active" and see if it's checked or not.
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For what it's worth - I have found that even if my partition is RAW, when I have gone to install XP it has still recognised the partition and then formatted to NTFS in the process of the installation.