Hard drives still not being found- have tried different hard disks!

[Clath]

I'm trying to install XP on a freshly fdisked and
formatted drive
(FAT32). The BIOS can see my drive but windows xp can't!
I get as far
as the list of partitions - and all of them are 'unknown
disk'.
Pressing c or d or anything at that point brings up an
error screen
with 'A problem has been detected...'
Technical information:
***STOP: 0x0000008E (0xc0000005, 0x807c6f65, 0xf80d8798,
0x00000000)
I have updated my BIOS and checked my RAM. I just can't install XP!

Hardware:
And yet I've had no difficulty with Windows 98, Windows
ME and Red Hat
9.0.

**Return to your 98 FDISK utility and remove all partitions.
Particularly the non dos partition/s created by redhat.
**Re-boot the computer and FDISK again. Create a fat32 partition after
answering yes to large disk support.
**Re-boot the computer. Format the fat32 partition with the 98 boot
disk.
**Re-boot the computer with you XP CD and install.
If these do not work, you will require the quantum zero fill disk
utility. Zero fill the drive, and boot your computer with the XP CD
and install.
**XP requires a fat16, fat32, or ntfs partition for setup temporary
files.


I have tried these steps and it doesn't work. It doesn't even work
when I use a **different** hard drive. It doesn't work whether I put
the drive in as primary master or seconday master. And why am I
getting a STOP*** error crash (either 0x50 or 0x8E depending on
whether I press 'c' or d'. Why not 'hard drive not found?' or
something?

 

[Martin]

Is this an IDE or SATA disk?

The problem you are discribing indicates that the disk has
not been formatted correctly.

How did you fdisk the drive - did you use fdisk that came
on the XP disk?

Have you tried another 3 part program like PartitionMagic
to format the hard drive?