formatting large drives

I'm trying to get this drive hooked into my box so I can use it and I'm not sure what's going on. I've formatted it with the Windows XP cd rom, partioned it, deleted the partion and everything I can think of. It copies over the setup files then restarts my computer. When my computer boots, it loads right off the cd again, creating and endless loop. Taking the CD in or out doesn't help. Without the CD my computer won't boot the drive. It says the disk is invalid.

That said, when and if I figure it out. The drive is 200gb, and I'm undestanding that you wont get that full size with NFTS. Say like, the drive will have 180gb of usable space, say. When I goto partition it with the setup stuff, it only reads 130gb.

I thought this was going to be simple. When I first got the drive, I hooked it into this xp box. I took the drive and put it in as slave. Did administrative storage tools to initiliaze it, partition it and format it. It did read like 186gb. I copied over like 20 of data from my 40gb system drive(this is replacing a 160gb that died in one year). I restarted after I put the drive in as master with no other drives hooked up. XP cd was in, setup process started running as usual, no formatting or partitioning needed as mentioned. Once it was ready for a restart, it did stage 1 all over again.

Repeat. Very annoying. What's going on?

Damn, I don't know why I had so much issue with this one. A friend of mine also has a 200 and just did the same thing. He put the CD in and went through the whole process essentially clicking OK/Next every step.

When I first got it, I mentioned formatting, intializazing, partitioning etc. with the system drive in already. That messed stuff up somehow. So, I undid that by removing it. I let setup do everything it needed. I booted with a 128mb hard drive. I plugged in the old drive with windows loaded and it detected the unused space. I partitioned it for use then restarted the computer with the 200 going loner. I can now use both parts of the disk but at this point I need to have it partioned in half.