Very Strange!

I purchased a new Western Difital, 160Gig Hard drive, placed it in my system as a master and “jumped” as such. I then tried to format with a DOS disk and it said, cannot format a network disk. I then tried to format from a CD drive using WinXP Pro and it could not access the disk. I then ran PC Diagnostics and it reads the disk fine, list the heads, cyliners and sectors fine, acts like nothing wrong. I am at my wits end as the disk should be readable, my BIOS recognizes it as a 160Gig hard disk but when I go to the system and try to use, cannot and also cannot format as I get the above answer, i.e. “cannot format a network disk” Any help? please let me know at sid_kraft@msn.com.