Windows XP BSOD will formatiing

Just to clarify, are you saying you are booting up Win-XP, then using the format options to try and format the drive that XP is on?

If so, even without the BSOD (more on that later) XP will not let you format the hard-drive that is currently running the XP you are using. If you really wish to totally scrub the drive that XP is running from, you need to boot up into a different operating system and use THAT to erase the XP drive. You can even use the XP install disc to do this, or burn yourself a live linux distro.

As for the BSOD, thats another issue. Since Windows will not (or should not) allow to format its working drive, it also shouldn't get to the point where it BSODs due to a formatting error. Perhaps there is an ongoing Windows error that manifests only during a format attempt. An error or corruption in explorer maybe?

Looking at the question, you seem to be trying to just change the current hard drive from a SATA to a IDE drive. This might be possible to do in the computers BIOS. During boot-up, you should see a screen that tells you to press *some* key to enter setup. It might be Delete, F2, F10, or some other key. Press that key before the screen clears, and you should enter the BIOS setup screen. From here, the exact procedure will differ depending on the manufacturer/model/chipset etc, but as a general rule, look for "sata settings", "hard drive settings", "disk settings" or something like that. Once found, you should simply be able to highlight the relevant disk and then change it from "sata" to "ide".

Before doing any of that though, be aware that sata drives can be used to link 2 or more drives into a single "logical" disk. Now while changing from sata to ide shouldn't prevent any problems in itself, (windows should still boot fine in other words) understand that if drive you are changing is a part of a logical drive setup, changing it to ide will break that link and potentially lose all data on the logical drive. If you only have 1 hard drive in the computer, its not an issue. If you have 2 hard drives, and they are linked, you should be asked to verify if you want to break that link, and if so, think carefully before you do. Most half decent sata controller even require you to go into a seperate screen to configure these links anyway, so you might not even be able to use the standard bios, and should instead look for an option during boot up to "configure sata array", or "setup sata drives" etc.

Good luck!