SATA Hard Drive - Couple of Questions

I've been reading a lot of posts on SATA driver installations and they all say to put drivers on a floppy. What can you do if you do not have a floppy drive installed? Can they be put on a CD? This is in reference to a fresh install of Win XP to a new SATA drive.
Also I want to partition and format the HD before installing Win XP. Is this done after installing the SATA drivers?

 

Unfortunatly (AFAIK) you need a floppy drive. The windows Setup program is configured to only read from drive A when you are installing windws (after you have hit F6 to load special drivers)

I've come across this a lot recently and have taken to carrying a spare Floppy Drive to format jobs now, I even wrote about it in my blog lol (about the only time I ever did write in it!)

http://ychatsharp.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,fa5eaa53-7968-4703-980e-fe4dcb3c0b88.aspx

 

Some PC's don't need Drivers on floppy to install windows unless doing Raid setup.

Another way is to slipstream your SATA and or Raid drivers to a windows CD
This can be done using nLite:
http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4324
You can also slipstream Windows Updates, Service Packs etc.
nLite guides, multiple Languages too:
http://www.nliteos.com/guides.html

Formating /Partitioning is done before Windows Install ( Format wipes out all data) Partitioning divides the drive.
A single HDD can have up to 4 primary Partitions ( when viewed within Windows "in My Computer" this will appear like 4 separate HDD
C,D,E,F or similar)
Windows OS must be installed on a primary Partition, if you make 4 primary Partitions windows can be installed on any one of the 4, if you install multiple OSes install the oldest first, on the first Partition.

Formating/Partitioning can be done with most Windows CDs, it can also be done with a Free utility from the HDD manufactures
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=25831