I have just bought a new seagate 160GB sata drive, plugged in the power cable and the sata data cable, I also have an PATA drive insdtalled which currently has XP installed on it and working fine, I have set the boot order for my dvd, then the SATA drive and thirdly the PATA drive,

I then booted up the pc with my XP disc in the dvd and started the installation, all went fine until i get to the main GUI installation when it takes a good 20 minutes to go from 39 minutes til setup is complete to 35 minutes,

something is definately wrong with it, but i cant think what it could be, any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, if any more info is needed please ask as i'm not sure what info is needed to remedy the problem

well it seems to be getting worse, since i first made this post 18 minutes ago it has managed to do a whole 1 minute more of the installation, Just another couple of points,

The PATA drive which already has XP installed on it works perfectly
the system itself is the following
pentium D 950
2GB DDR
geforce 6200 LE
160GB seagate SATA
200GB Maxtor PATA

well the installation has now finished and it only took 2 hours :P

the drive is still performing extremely slow, i would really appreciate any tips anyone has to resolve this annoying issue

This could be a bad cable or a bad drive even. Or it could be a software issue, make sure that the drive isn't using UDMA, go to start > run and type in devmgmt.msc. Expand the one that says IDE ATA/ATAPI Controlers. Double click on Primary IDE Controller, select the Advanced Settings tab. Make sure that Transfer Mode is set at DMA if available.

Good luck,
Adam