question on using sata drive

[Archie Benton]

I just bought a new sata drive and I have it in a machine with a motherboard 
that has a sata port. When I tried to load ubuntu on this drive
directly, it failed. (it also failed using slackware 10 too). Since
then, I formated this hard drive with the formater provided by the
company (Seagate) --to a fat filesystem. I've been able to use it as a
secondary drive for ubuntu (which I have on an a regular ata drive) by
creating a mount point for it in the fstab file and using /dev/sda1
for it. Any thoughts on how I could actually start using it as my main
drive (thru creative reformating)? This may be a Q for the seagate
people. I'm uncomfortable using a drive with the fat filesystem on it
and would like to at least convert it to ext3.