Built my new computer yesterday, athlonxp2800, 1 gig kingston 3200 ram, radeon 9800 pro, dfi infinity ultra mobo and 80gig diamondmax 9 sata hard drive. Tried to load on windows xp and it constantly hangs at the formatting hard drive stage. I have put on the sata drivers when prompted and tried both options that windows gave me for formatting fast and normal and in both cases after an hour nothing had happened still said 0% formatted. Did I stop too soon (I thought sata drives were supposed to be faster than normal drives?). I tried a quickformat using the raid controller on the mobo and even this took 45 minutes and windows still hung at the same stage afterwards. Ive checked all connections and the bios says everything is fine with all components. Do you think the hard drive is dodgy? I've never used sata before and am beginning to wish I had stuck to ATA. :-(

 

I had the exact same problem with the same hard drive and it was actualy the motherboard that caused the problem (Epox) i swaped it for an Abit board and then it formated no broblem and now runs 24hrs a day, poss try update bios first

Andy