Im trying to install windows xp on an old tower ive got. Sadly its only got SATA dirves and i dont have a floppy disk to load SATA drivers from.

So im going to plug in an old PATA drive i have lying around and install XP on that. However XP says it cannot read to/from it for some reason, probably because its out of an xbox.  

Anyone know a boot disk utility that will be able to format it?

Also, is there any other way of loading SATA/RAID drivers during an XP install other than floppy?

You can put them on a cd and load from there, you should be able to download the boot disc utility from the hdd manufactors web site.
Easiest thing is to use a xp disc with sp2 or sp3 on as they have the sata drivers.

Cheers, im going to give nlite a go and see if i can integrate the drivers into the install.

Looks like all STAT drives go via a RAID controller (DFI LanParty NFII mobo) so SP2/3 drives dont pick them up.

Thanks for the reply

Hirens bootdisk can acess SATA and  have HDD tools partitioning etc.

Any Live Linux CD and a small bit of googling will give you what you need to completely reformat a HDD.

nLite, solves your problems for future as well if you save the disk.  I have both my XP64 and Sin7 disks set up with it.