Going insane, newbie installing windows xp on newly built pc

[acrylic man]

I have just built my first pc, all brand new parts and simply I am trying to install Windows XP Home on it:

ECS KN1 Extreme motherboard http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWeb/Product...uID=16&LanID=9
Geil Dual Channel 2x512mb ram
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939)
Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GV-NX66256DP2
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 NCQ 300GB 6V300F0 SATA-II 16MB Cache
LG DVD Writer (I can't remember exact specs)
£5 floppy disk drive reader

sorry this is an essay, I felt since a few things had happened in the run up to my problem I should mention them.

First off the BIOS tended to have auto detect selected for most things, i only changed the date and time and changed the first selected boot device to the cd rom. I saved all that and went ahead to put the windows xp disk into the dvd writer and and it loaded into the windows xp install start screen. I hit enter which i hoped would bring me to the liscence agreement, but it came up i needed to load drivers to detect my hard drive, i half expected it as the book i was using on how to build a pc warned me about this so i assumed i needed to put drivers on a floppy and do the F6 deal so it would detect my sata hard drive. My motherboard doesn't come with a floppy for this so i hunted on the cd that came with it for the drivers, it had nothing obvious for sata drivers, though i found some sata drivers in the raid section of the cd but none of these worked. i tried the manufacturers website for drivers but no luck, i read somewhere about sata drives could be auto dected as an ide drive with a modern motherboard or something though, so i started wondering if the reason i couldn't find drivers was because there wasn't any. I couldn't understand what else i could do, the bios was set on auto to find the hard drive so i randomly tried a different sata port on my motherboard. It was sata port 3, i was using number 1 before obviously, and somehow it worked, i got to the liscence agreement and i started formatting my hard drive. It looked ok and it got to 4% and then it sort of got stuck. I thought it was maybe being slow, it was a 300gb hard drive, so i left it for another 35 minutes but nothing was happening and i thought it had maybe crashed. I went to switch the pc off and i couldn't do it from the front, so i thought the pc must of had a big crash and i switched it off from the psu. I started the pc up again and after POST it came up with a windows installation error, i restarted the pc and hit enter when it asked 'boot from cd' just before it came up with the windows installation error and it started going into the windows xp install start up and i went right through to format it again and it gave me two options. There was a partitioned 2xxxxxxx (that may not be right number of x's) section and a 8mb unpartitioned section. I tried formatting on the partition section and the pc got stuck at 4% again. I then tryed deleting the 2xxxxxxx partitioned section but it came up an error and now i don't want to try anything else because i'm not sure what i'm doing.

I just wanted to simply install windows xp home edition! Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks to anyone in advance

[pam123]

Okay.
You may have a problem with an nForce4 board and that Maxtor drive.
I quote from the Jan. 2006 edition of MaximumPC on pg. 35 where they tested hard drives, in this case the Maxtor DiamondMax 11 :

When we first hooked the DiamondMax to our nForce4 test bench, we could only read from the drive not write to it. We got a second drive and suffered the same problem. It turns out there's an incompatibility between this drive and our nVidia chipset, which is a huge fiasco. We're even more concerned because Maxtor had exactly the same problem with the DiamondMax 10. It's inexcusable, and therefore drops Maxtor from contention.

Since you've got the Max10 and an nForce4 board my suggestion is that you exchange that drive for one from Seagate or Western Digital.

[acrylic man]

oh man, thats annoying i have to try and send my hard drive back. Thanks for helping me though