Trying to reinstall XP

[Emmerich]

I wish to completely reinstall XP on my PC along with reformatting my hard drive. Everything I read says all I need to do is boot from the install CD and after setting up my partition, it will let me format. I can boot fine, including using SATA drivers off a floppy since XP does not support them (before SP2 I think). I can delete and recreate my partition, but I never get any option to format. I get an error saying Windows can't recognize the drive, this is after it installs the SATA drivers with no problem.

Anybody know what might be going on?

thanks
Fred Emmerich