SATA Hard drive problems

[gtwill040]

I have a 40GB Maxtor hard drive installed which xp is installed on.
I have a tiny 3.9 GB hard drive just for some files.

I purchased a 160GB SATA DiamondMax 10 (maxtor) yesterday and it arrived today, its for extra storage (Games etc)

I already had installed all necessary drivers when i first got my Motherboard Asrock K8-upgrade.

I attached the SATA drive and BIOS recognises it. Its at non-raid (dunno what that means).

It doesnt show up in my computer most likely because its no partitioned and formatted.

Went to Disk Management to format the drive but it gives an error and the drive disappears.
I tried partitioning it with Partition Magic 8 which also gives an error.

What do i do now?
Thanks in advance for any help

 

[euchrid]

Track down a copy of DiscWizard. It's a free program that Seagate released, but it should work on all SATA drives. It should sort you out.

 

[gtwill040]

Ok thanks, i just downloaded Maxtors big drive enabler.

I have Service pack 2 for xp.
I will also search for DiscWizard and let you know what happens.

Thanks again and heres hoping

 

[gtwill040]

DiscWizard ask for the model number of a Seagate hard drive and it says its important. Should i try maxblast 4?

 

[gtwill040]

Maxblast 4 says its partitioned and formatted it. But it hasnt really done it.

 

[gtwill040]

OK Nvidia had some new drivers, so i installed them and now i can access the drive to partition it.

However i used Partition Magic and it didnt get to complete the format because anti-virus was on.

Now the PC keeps restarting. Is there no way to stop it restarting so i can format it.

I dont think Fdisk can format a 160GB hard drive or can it?

 

[gtwill040]

Fixed it, i can access the drive now and its formatted with FAT32 with 149GB Free space. Guess thats not bad.

I remove my other 2 hard drives incase i formatted them by mistake.
Fdisked the drive and from dos FORMAT C:

Now i will install some games and see what happens

I reinstalled xp pro sp2 earlier aswel to see if it would fix on a clean install which it didnt any.

 

[gtwill040]

SATA I/O Problem now. Same \Device\Harddisk2\D error
So i cant write to the disc