Trouble formatting second hard drive

I'm a novice and probably should have let the Geek Squad take care of this but...I'm trying to format the second hard drive I installed on my Gateway. My OS is Windows XP home. The drive is recognized as "healthy" under disk manager. I have already tried the right-click format. It goes through the whole process of formatting and when it gets to the end, an error box pops up that says "unable to format drive." How do I solve this problem?

In several of the posts I have read, people talked about installing an OS on the new drive. I want to use the second drive for storage, particularly video and music files. Is that necessary? XP came pre-installed, so all I have is a recovery disk. Can I use that to install XP on the new drive?

As a result of this mess I've created, when I boot up I get an error message about no disk in drive (or something like that--I'm at work and will post the exact language later). If I put the new hard-drive's CD-rom in, XP starts. Can someone explain what's going on so I don't have to put the disk in every time?

Thanks in advance for your help.
--pima17

Are your hard drives set at master and slave?

if not read your harddrive. physical on top of it to learn how

That is true, If you are only using the second (slave ) drive for storage there is no need to install the operating system.

As for the problem where you cant format, possibly its faulty.
If there is any way you can get another blank hard drive try to format that and if you get the same error then you can try bringing it to the Geek squad, or anywhere else you see fit.

I Hope this helps,

Skirge

what is greek squarD?

Yep, I set the jumpers for slave on the second drive. I'm pretty sure the rest of the settings are correct, but to be safe, I'll double check them again after work.

If I wanted to run programs on the second drive, then would I have to install an OS?

BTW-The Geek Squad is a 24-hour computer services company that has teamed up with Best Buy.