Got a XPS400 with a 160GB Serial ATA drive. Having problems with the whole, format and partitioning off the space. Not sure if it is Dell related or HDD related, since I dont have much experience with these drives. If anyone knows some tricks to setting up a partitioned HDD via SATA with WinXP let me know

As long as SATA is enabled on your motherboard it should partition just like an IDE drive.
Are you making a second drive or using this for windows?

I am using this for windows, I only have this drive and want to partition it into two. If I set the HDD option on Combination in the BIOS, that is the only way I can get it to read the HDD while using the XP CD to load up. I am able to creat partitions, but once I created one, I can not see the other in windows as a drive, nor does device manager recognize the rest of the drive....so I only have a 40gb HDD instead of a 160, i cant find the other 120. With IDE drives you can just format them within windows, I can not do this with this drive.

boreas is your man... he helped me out so much

Go to your Control panel, double click on the "administrative tools" icon. From there, double click 'computer management." Now click on the "disk management" text in the left pane. What does it show for drives? Does it show one as not being formatted? You should be able to find the drive you want by the space available in GB.

XP has a problem with drives over 120gb. I'll try to find a link with some info...

once you format windows onto half of it you have to format the other half also because if you dont put the NTFS file system on it it is just read as RAW unpartitioned space(which windows cant read)

True, but for some reason I cant escape windows wanting to install the OS again on the other partition....therefore having two OS'*, in which case this computer will make me choose which OS to boot to. I got my hands on Parition Magic from Norton, gonna try this

I installed a 300gb sata a few weeks ago and thats all I had to do was enable it on the bios and it all went easy from there.
I have a Asus P48SX mobo.

Its called 48bit lba, old versions of windows like xp sp1 and 2000 sp3 did not like it.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;303013


or you just have unallocated space and need to create a volume.

IF it is a 48bit lba problem and the drive is:

Maxtor:
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=11

Seagate:

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di...137_winxp.html