Formatting problem in Win XP

I have a system set up with two drives. A 3.1GB and a 14.5GB, both western digitals. I had Win98 installed on the 14.5GB drive. I then formatted the 3.1GB in FAT32 and installed WinXP on it. When i tried to format it, it got to 100% and an error came up saying "Windows was unable to complete the format". I then had to install WinXP by converting from Fat32 to NTFS rather than a full format.

I now have WinXP runing properly and want to format the 14.5GB drive and copy the entire 3.1GB drive over to it and run from the larger drive. When I try to format the 14.5GB drive I get the exact same error message. I even converted the drive to NTFS which worked fine and tried a quick format, but I still got the same error message.

Any advice on what may be causing this problem would be appreciated. I need to get the 14.5GB formatted since I'm out of space on the other drive.

Thanks,
Rob A.