SATA drive wont recognise as master

[The[J]oker]

I was working on my computer the other day and tried a format. Although it wouldn't format because it finds my SATA drive as slave and when I try to format it says "Windows cannot find a hard drive installed..."
And another problem I had was my computer would boot to the Windows XP booting screen with the bar thingy and then blue screen of death would appear randomly and then it would automatically restart. I don't know what the problem could be.
Any help?

 

[Shadowmoose]

Windows XP doesn't really support SATA drives, if it isnt' being detected by the setup you probably have to slip in some drivers from your motherboards site with the F6 key in startup.

 

[Celegorm]

The sata controller is probably set to RAID in BIOS. set it to Legacy, or IDE (which one depends on BIOS) then you should be good.

FYI, SATA does not have master/slave. The "master" drive is determined by the drive that is plugged into the lowest number port on the motherboard.