Hardware

Has a Partition Manager?

You can use that to format the HDD.

DOS itself is unable to address anything bigger than about 4 GIG.

Of course if you do not have SP1 on the Install Disc it can not address any HDD bigger than 128 GIG as that is all that the Original XP was written to deal with.

Col

hiyou can download a live linux ditribution, delete all partitions reboot with the Windows CD and let windows setup the partitions automatically

you can get it on gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

When the Windows XP install CD is booting, you get an option to "Press F6 to load additional drivers". Try using it to load manufacturer's drivers for the HDD and controller.

Since you're mixing "DOS" and "160GB" in the same sentence, I'm guessing that everything is old. Early versions of Windows XP did not have SATA support included yet, and frequently if you can load new XP SATA drivers with F6, you will be able to complete the installation process.

edit: and I hope you do realize that if you really need to install DOS, you may not be able to address all of the space on the 160GB drive. That's a limitation of DOS: 2 GB for FAT16, depending on what version you install.

Note that the DOS version of FDISK has a limit of around 65GB of hard drive size for the maximum supported disk size.

Windows XP had a 137GB partition space limit until Service Pack 1.

Depending on if you can get the XP installation program to recognize the USB floppy drive, you can either use the F6 option to load the storage / SATA driver for the Toshiba, or you may have to slip-stream the driver onto a new installation CD.

There are plenty of articles and TR forum posts on how to slip-stream drivers and service packs into a new XP install CD. Most make use of a program called Bart PE.

Worst case, mount the drive in a USB case or with a drive adapter cable onto a working system and format the drive from there. I would recommend creating a second logical drive and placing copies of all the drivers for the Toshiba there. That way, the drivers are on the hard drive and you can install them directly from the drive.

Chas

You can try download a live linux ditribution, delete all partitions reboot with the Windows CD and let windows setup the partitions automatically, I googled websites that maybe useful and gparted.com seemed to be a good one for this.