Are you formatting the drive during OS install? Do you you have two Hard drives in your system, or just one? And, just how old is the system?
You can't change from FAT32 to NTFS on a drive that has the OS on it. Worse, if you're trying to reinstall from a manufacturer's recovery CDs or an image on a partition, some of the companies made their recovery stuff do their restore in FAT32.
If you have two drives in the system, have the OS on the smaller one, and attempt to format the larger with NTFS.
Also, check and make sure the system has the ntfs.sys file.
Another likely scenario, of a system 2 or more years old, is that the BIOS of the motherboard isn't set up to boot from SATA and/or NTFS drives correctly. check for a BIOS update for your motherboard.
If all else fails, find someone that has a SATA machine, have THEM format your new HD with NTFS, and have it formatted as a Bootable HP.
You MIGHT be able to have the Hard drive with the XP reinstall in FAT 32 as an extra HD in a machine that can handle 3 or more drives, then copy ALL the data from it to a Bootable NTFS drive set up as another extra HD, to get around this. Then pull the NTFS drive into your machine, and if it boots, THEN go and do a total reformat of your old drive as well.
I had to do something similar to this with an IDE drive computer, whose OS was on a 20 GB FAT32 HD. I formatted the new (120 GB) HD as NTFS bootable, pulled both drives, stuck them as the 2nd & 3rd HD in another system, then went in, selected ALL of the drive contents, and copied to the NTFS drive. I then stuck the NTFS drive in and it worked - but that may have been a fluke...
