Need help formatting unallocated hd space - disk management wont work

hey guys,
i recently installed windows xp service pack 1 on a new system i built. I have a 250GB hdd but as we all know, old versions of XP can only read 131gb. so i updated to sp2 and now it shows my hdd is 250GB, but only 131gb are usable because the rest isnt formatted. i ran disk management and selected to format all the unallocated space to a new X: drive. however as soon as the formatting finished, the computer crashed. i couldnt get it to boot again until i shut off the machine and turned it back on. now it shows the X: drive in My Computer, but it still isnt formatted. i tried formatting it again as NTFS by right clicking but again it crashed upon completion. does anyone know what i can do to get the rest of my hard drive space usable? thanks alot for the help

are there any free programs or programs with free trials icould use to partition the space?