I wonder how many people have run into this. I recently did a clean install on an XP system with 3 hard drives. The first 2 drives that are listed are IDE and the partitions were hidden with a separate manager. The 3rd drive is SATA and shows "Unpartitioned space". This drive had Windows XP installed on it before and that partition was deleted for the clean install.

I selected the unpartitioned space on the 3rd drive and created a 40 GB partition to install to which I plan to expand later. Begin installing and this happens.

Found image on another site.

The drive selection screen is essentially useless because setup always tries to install to the first drive listed. Disconnect the 2 IDE drives so that only the SATA appears in the list and setup was able to proceed.