Booting off of SATA drive

Hi, I recently got a new SATA HDD which I wish to boot off of when I reformat my system, its a Maxtor brand. I have heard however not to use the software that Maxtor included with the drive for partitioning, and setting up the SATA software because they're shitty or something.

Anyways, I need a recommendation for a good tool/software for that will allow my system to recognize the SATA drive so that I may partition, format and install my OS onto it.

if your motherboard is not ancient you probably do not need to install drivers with F6

and XP should have no problems with it (at least with SP1 or 2)

>>1
wtf?  just use fdisk like any real man would