Error with New HD and WinXP

Hello,

I am a computer tech and have a problem with a new Hitachi Plat 20, 80 GB Hard Drive I am trying to install.

My system is an older Pentium IV computer. Below is the info:

Processor: Pentium IV 1.5 GHz
Motherboard: Intel D850GB
Memmory: 512 MB RAMBUS Memmory @ 400 MHz

I have tried to seek help from the Intel website and the Hitachi web site but could not find any answers to my questions. Intel has stopped providing any support for their motherboard and Hitachi has no record of any similar problems. I have the last BIOS update installed (P1 and the computer runs fine with my older 40 GB and 30 GB hard drives but not with the new 80 GB hard drive.

Here is a description of the problem:

The BIOS seems to recognize the hard drive fine, at least it reports the correct size and parameters of the drive. There are a couple of options in the BIOS that I have tried such as setting it as a "user" configuration but the BIOS does not allow me to input the drive characteristics such as Sectors, Tracks and Heads as all this is automatically detected by the BIOS. The hard drive is connected to the IDE by a new 80 connector ribbon cable and I have tried with my older 80 connector cable as well.

When I tried to install the drive with the older 40 GB hard drive as my master and keeping the OS (WinXP Pro SP2) on the older drive it will partition the drive without any problem but fails upon formatting the drive in NTFS. It will format the drive under FAT32 and show no errors, however with FAT32 any information copied to the drive is corrupted and unreadable.

Thinking that there may be a conflict between the older and newer drives, I removed the old drive and partitioned and formatted the new drive and installed WinXP Pro booting from the CD which was done without any problems. After installation of the OS I proceeded to install Service Pack 2 and upon re-boot got the BSOD (blue screen of death) with an NTFS.SYS error. I can however boot up in safe mode. Doing this I uninstalled SP2 and the computer booted up normally. I then installed SP1 and all the updates and still was able to boot up normally. However, I noticed that the any information that was on the drive was not reported correctly in size, using up much more than the actual size of the files. I have done this with partitions of varying sizes from 30 GB to 80 GB and got the same problems.

Trying a workaround, I booted from the WinXP CD and used the diskpart program included with WinXP to partition and the Recovery Console to format the drive under NTFS which was done without any problems. Then I again connected the older drive as the master and booted up normally, brought the new drive on-line with the diskmanager utility but the OS would not recognize the new drive correctly and it did not appear in explorer as it reported a corrupt MBR or File Allocation Table error.

On the new drive I have tried everything. Disabling the spin-down, switching to the 15 heads option...etc. and still was not able to get it to work properly. In the BIOS I have also tried every conceivable option, shutting down the UDMA, lowering the PIO, shutting off disk caching...etc. and still got the same problem.

I tried to exchange the drive for another one and/or get a refund but I am not in the U.S. and the store will not do anything to solve my problem (obviously they have lost a customer for life as has Intel for their lack of support for an item that is only 3-4 years old).

If anyone has any more suggestions or ideas on how I can get this new drive to work I would be more than greatful for their help.

Thank you for your time in this complex and long post.