XP Wont' PartitionNew HD

[Kryan1066]

I just bought a Soyo 800MHZ/Socket 370 mobo and a new 40 GB Maxtor HD. I can boot from the Win XP Home CD but when it gets to the part where I'm suuposed to partition the HD, it says "press C to partition this unpartioned space" or something like that. When I press C, it goes to the next screen where it says to select the partition size. But when I press enter, it takes me back to the previous screen, where it shows me the same unpartitioned space (which seems weird because I partioned it with NTFS on my XP machine) again. I press C and end up in an endless loop! Can anyone help?

Kryan

[Alan]

Since the drive is new,do a low-level format(0's) with the Maxtor utilities disk,then let the OS partition the drive upon installation and don't partition it before hand.There's probably an easier way,but that's what I usually do before reinstallation.

[Kryan1066]

Originally posted by Alan:
Since the drive is new,do a low-level format(0's) with the Maxtor utilities disk,then let the OS partition the drive upon installation and don't partition it before hand.There's probably an easier way,but that's what I usually do before reinstallation.

Alan,

That is what I started out trying to do. But the same thing happened. It is only through trying other things that I have ended up using the other computer to first partition, then format it. And still the new computer won't recognize the drive, nor will XP's installation do anything but bounce me back and forth after reporting 7052 mb of unpartioned space (and nothing else). This also seems odd since it is a 40 GB computer. any ideas?

Kryan