New hard drive, cannot install OS

Hi

I just purchased a Maxtor diamond max 9 80gig HD, I have installed the drive and my bios recognises it, inputs the heads and cylynders etc correctly. but when i try to install win ME (upgrade to xp later) i get the message saying i need to create an ms-dos boot partition, then just the a:\> command prompt, if i fdisk and create a partition of any sort, when i go into the boot sequence from floppy i get the error message:

invalid media type reading dive c:

i also get this message if trying to format the HD

This is a brand new HD so i was under the impression that no partitions needed to be created, i am using a nec recovery pogram, fo boot, which worksd fine when installing on other systems, also i have 2 98 bootdisks with corupt config files, and a win me bootdisk from bootdisk.com which names my cd-drive banana / apple / orange etc but doesnt recognise the drive is there!

cheers