X-ray surveys contain sizable numbers of star-forming galaxies, beyond the AGN which usually make up the majority of detections. Many methods to separate the two populations are used in the literature, based on X-ray and multi-wavelength properties. The authors aim at a detailed test of the classification schemes and to study the X-ray properties of the resulting samples. They build on a sample of galaxies selected at 1.4 GHz in the VLA-COSMOS survey, classified by Smolcic et al. (2008, ApJS, 177, 14) according to their optical colors and also observed by Chandra. A similarly selected control sample of AGN is also used for comparison. The authors review some X-ray based classification criteria and check how they affect the sample composition. The efficiency of the classification scheme devised by Smolcic et al. (2008) is such that ~30% of composite/misclassified objects are expected because of the higher X-ray brightness of AGN with respect to galaxies. The latter fraction is actually 50% in the X-ray detected sources, while it is expected to be much lower among X-ray undetected sources. Indeed, the analysis of the stacked spectrum of undetected sources shows, consistently, strongly different properties between the AGN and galaxy samples. X-ray based selection criteria are then used to refine both samples. The radio/X-ray luminosity correlation for star-forming (SF) galaxies is found to hold with the same X-ray/radio ratio valid for nearby galaxies. Some evolution of the ratio may be possible for sources at high redshift or high luminosity, though it is likely explained by a bias arising from the radio selection. Finally, in their paper the authors discuss the X-ray number counts of star-forming galaxies from the VLA- and C-COSMOS surveys according to different selection criteria, and compare them to the similar determination from the Chandra Deep Fields. The classification scheme proposed here may find application in future works and surveys. This table contains the catalogs of radio-selected SF- and AGN-candidate sources with an X-ray detection in C-COSMOS which were contained in Tables 2 and 3 of the reference paper, respectively. The HEASARC has merged these into a single table, adding a new parameter sample which is set to 'SFG' for radio-selected SF-candidate sources from Table 2 and to 'AGN' for the AGN-candidate sources from Table 3. This table was created by the HEASARC in June 2012 based on CDS table J/A+A/542/A16 files table2.dat and table3.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .