SATA Hard Drive Issue

Hello All,

I am new here to the forum obviously and I have a problem hopefully someone will know how to fix. I'm running a small business repairing pc's and I have a customer who can not install XP Pro on their new machine. It's custom built and is intended to be a gaming pc. Here are a few specs if it helps:

ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE Motherboard
4 GB RAM (this guy is crazy)
One Seagate 300GB SATA HD
One Hitachi 400GB SATA HD

The problem is I am trying to Install XP Pro but the Setup program sees the hard drives as only 130ish GB. Now I understand that I press F6 and load the 3rd party device drivers so I do that. Windows starts installing and everything but still misreports the hard drive size even with the correct drivers loaded. The computer reboots and then shows the usual XP loading screen with the progress bar and all that but then it freezes and it never makes it to the desktop. At this point I don't believe Setup has actually finished installing XP. BIOS sees both the hard drives and they are displayed correctly there. The drivers are installed during setup like they are supposed to be. I spent almost 2 hours on the phone with Microsoft and the dude in India was nice and actually knowledgeable (sp?) but couldn't fix the problem.

Anybody have any suggestions at all I could try? I'm getting desperate here.

Thanks in advance!

 

Are you formatting the drives as FAT32 or NTFS? FAT32 won't support the full size of those drives. Also, is LBA enabled?