Problem formatting UATA Seagate 400G Drive

I am trying to use a UATA Seagate 400g drive in a firewire housing. I am using WinXP - Sp1 on one machine and SP2 on another. I wanted to swap the drive around as needed between work - 5 machines, home - 2 machines, friends, etc. It is intended mostly as a music/video drive. However, I can only get it to format to 132G under either OS pack when using it as Firewire. I realize the limits on formatting, and I've downloaded the drivers from Intel, Dell, and MajorGeeks to allow bigger format sizes - eventhough I already have SP1 and 2 respectively.
I have formatted a 250G and a 300G in both computers as Internals - so I know I can formatt large drive sizes, but I cannot get this drive going as an external firewire... is there a limit I don't know about when formatting via firewire? In case you're thinking it, I also tried to install it internally to both my machines.. when BIOS posts I see a meesage that recognizes a 400G drive as a slave... but as both my machines are SATA masters, and IDE slots are full, I couldn't get either machine to boot with the drive set for cable select, and with the Slave IDE connector attached... I am stumped. Any ideas???

WinXp - SP1, SP2 ( 2 machines )
main
Pentium 4 / 3.2 GHz HT
1024 mb RAM
CD -RW
DVD - RW
Flop
300G HD
60G OS MBHD
1G nic