SATA hard drive help

[phillai]

Today I got a Maxtor 160gb SATA hard drive today and I'm having problems trying to partition it (in four equal parts) and formating it?

Can anyone give me some advice on how to do it properly?

Everytime I'm doing it in disk management on XP it keeps bombing out after a bit of time. Also I noticed that it makes my PC crawl to almost a standstill whilst doing this.

I own an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe NFORCE2 motherboard using Win XP Professional with two Maxtor 80gb ATA133 drives at the mo. Both these are on FAT32 file system and I noticed when I tried to format the new SATA I could only do it in NTFS.

BTW, I intend to replace my current 80gb ATA133 hard drives to two 16-gb new SATA hard drives.

Many thanks for all your help!

[Fragmaster]

Well first make sure your system is set up to use SATA, I think in the BIOS there should be an SATA boot option, but then with the ASUS boards, it isn't there IIRC, so you will have to use SCSI boot...

Also install the latest SP1 so Windows enables large disk support (137gb+) and detects the 160gb SATA drive. If all is well in that department I recommend using a 3rd party partitioning program as the Windows one is pretty hit and miss, give Partition Magic a try, quite a nice program IMO. (reformat first with the program that comes with drive.... maxblast is it?)

All should go well, good luck mate, and enjoy that beast of a drive

Anyhow I recommend using the FAT32 converter in XP to change the drives to NTFS, it is a better File System and performs much better, with

A) Larger Files &
B) Larger HDD's

[phillai]

Thanks for the tips.
I've almost done everything ya mentioned already but I'll try and get and give Partition Magic a try.

Also this 160gb drive I got at the moment is gonna be my secondary drive for the time being.