Bios not complying with SATA drive

[CODKill]

I just recieved all of my parts to build my new system. Everything was installed perfectly and working until I tried to install windows xp. For some reason, everytime my drive is plugged in, the bios continuously tries to figure out what this drive is, so it never goes anywhere. So basically, whenever the drive I want to install windows to inplugged in, my computer does nothing. I even tried to put it in another computer to format it, but even though windows recognizes it, it refuses to assign it a drive letter. ANYTHING TO HELP!

The system is a P4 3.73 EE
Asus P5WD2 MB
Wester Digital 74GB 10k RPM
Gigabyte X850XT PCI-E

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Don't totally follow you. New build and there is ONLY a single SATA drive connected, right?

Check the BIOS settings and make sure that in the boot order the CD-Rom is listed BEFORE the SATA drive (sometimes called SATA, and sometimes called SCSI - BIOS usually treats SATA drives as SCSI drives). Make sure that none of the IDE drives (usually called HDD0 thru HDD3) are in the boot order.