Reformat problem ( HDD to big? )

On a new seagate 200gb hdd I installed XP and made a partition size of 20gb, it was only seeing the drive as a 130gb as per normal.
When windows was installed I could then go ahead and format the rest of the drive as a second partition under managment and that of course come out at the proper size of 175gb odd.

Now this is my problem....

New GFX today so I set about formating to get the best out of the new gfx and hl2.

All went as normal unitll I reached the Verifying DMI Pool for the first time and it would hang.

After trying a few things like BIOS reset, CMOS reset it then wouldnt detect the hdd at all, swapped some cables around and got it to detect but this time I got disk boot faliure.

Down loaded the Seagate hdd utility to run and it's now coming up as the large partion as damaged.


This now has me thinking, is the larger partition stopping the format working as it's larger than 120gb? As Ive never had such a large partition before.

What are the chances of deleting both partitions, going back and trying to install windows again on the detected 120gb ( what windows installer sees when no active partitions ), making a 20gb partition and then sorting out the rest of the gb if when setup again in windows?