I have exactly the same problem with a Western Digital brand new 160 gig hard drive. When I try to NTFS format it, I get the error message"The second NTFS boot sector is unwriteable". The history on this drive is that the WD software boot CD would not work. Called WD and they said to install Windows XP and that would format it. I did but that also created some other problems so had to reformat the drive. That is when I get the error message. I can format it as a FAT32 drive with no problems. I partioned the FAt32 drive into 125 gigs and 25 gigs and tried to format the 25 gig partition as NTFS. Succeeded but only had 6 gig free space (don't know where the 19 gigs went-overhead was supposedly only 90 megs) so went back to FAT32.
Further to my earlier post. The small FAT32 partition that I created could be used normally--created folders, etc. Later (hours) after a reboot, I could use the folders i had created but could not create new ones. Error message was "Invalid folder name or path or folder already exists. The larger partion seemed to wrk fine, just the smaller one had the probelm. I could repeat this situation at will. So now I have just one 160 gig FAT32 partion on the dive. by the way, here is a URL related to the initial problem http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/w2kmsgs/2413.asp
After mushing asround, i decided to just partition my hard drive and format each partition as NTFS. I found that I could make 2 60 gigs and 1 30 gig partition with no problem. Don't know why I couldn't make a single 152 gig partition.
Hi kwhiz01 From what I understand with any hard drive larger than 137 GB to correctly work a few details need to be in place. 1 - The motherboard / Bios must support 137 GB + hard drive 2 - Windows XP with SP1 update installed I have successfully installed 2 160 GB hard drives into 2 different machines as secondary drives. I have yet to install as a primary drive. I hope this helps
