Technology Forum

This one is really bamboozling me. I'm attempting to install windows xp SP1 on a new, 320GB Seagate SATA hard drive. SATA is enabled in the BIOS, and I boot the computer using the XP installation CD. Since it's only a single drive and I'm not setting up a RAID, I figured I didn't need to bother pressing F6 to install a third party driver and just continued setup as normal. So setup got to the point where I need to select the drive to install Windows on. Setup detected the drive fine, and I created a new partition with the maximum capacity. I then formatted the drive with the NTFS file system. The format reached 100%, then setup came back at me and said there was an error with the drive and it could no longer read it. Even after rebooting and running XP setup again, it can not read the drive. I can't even delete the partition I created (if I attempt to do so, I get a blue screen of death). I'm thinking possibly to install the 3rd party drivers that came with my motherboard at the beginning of setup even though I'm not setting up a RAID and seeing if that does anything, and if it still doesn't work the drive itself could be faulty (though I've never, ever had any problems with Seagates). However I believe there's also a possibility that SP1 setup doesn't recognise drives over 300GB so once it was formatted setup no longer detected it correctly (problem is, I don't have an SP2 disc to test that theory with). Does anyone have any suggestions on this one?