The drive is 120GB. It came out of an HP comp. which has a trashed mobo. HP - hence, most of the problems. Proprietary 5GB "HP Recovery" partition had to be deleted before I could even reformat. Now I'm even having trouble getting Windows setup to work on the drive in the new box. Should I add it as a slave in another Windows comp. and delete partitions and reformat to start from scratch on the new box?

you should be able to delete the partition and format the drive with the XP CD