Formating Sata HD while booting from Ide HD

[bpnbm]

When I started this process it seemed like it would be easy enough. I have an old dell dimension 8400 and the HDD went bad. I had a SATA HDD with winows xp 64 bit on it. I also had a very small 20gb HDD drive that is attached with an old IDE plug. So i loaded xp (32bit) on the 20gb HDD hoping to use at least the cmd prompt to re format the disk. It doesn't seem like the MB can load the IDE and SATA HDD even though the bios shows both drives enabled. How can I erase the larger SATA HDD so I can Load windows xp on to it? Thanks in advance for all your help.

 

[electrontau]

When you load the XP disc in the middle of the setup process you can format the drive. So no need to have another drive with OS just to format your SATA drive. All you need to do is plug in the SATA drive, make sure BIOS detect it, load XP disc and boot from it. In the XP setup you can reformat the drive.

 

[bpnbm]

Yeah that's the first thing I tried. Seemed simple enough, right? Windows xp wouldn't recognize it as a valid HDD. It kept telling me to install a valid HDD. Seemed kind of strange. Any other thoughts on the matter?