For those of you not wanting to read that long post, I'll summarize it quickly. I bought a 250GB sataII hard drive, I didn't know these things could be incompatible with motherboards, I asked the vendor to make sure it would work fine on my system. He assured me it would work like a charm. Long story made shorter, I hooked up the drive and booted up, the drive didn't show up at all. In Disk Management it did, but if I tried to format, it would freeze up my entire windows. I tried with nVidia chipset drivers and without, didn't seem to change it. I could not format it. Tried all the right settings, googled around, in the end I took the drive back to the store the same day, the man refused to take it back and replace it with another brand.
He plopped the drive into his testing machine, and it worked fine. He said I must have been doing something wrong, so I asked what chipset the test machine had. It was a VIA chipset, which seemed to not have issues with a Maxtor DiamondMax10 250GB with 16mb cache. He formatted it in NTFS, and that seemed to solve some things, I could now see it, and format it in the partitions I wanted.
When I shut down my pc, and booted up the next day, I found a new issue. My computer refused to boot up with the sata drive connected, I even reinstalled windows to hopefully solve it, but to no avail. So for a while, I unhook the (hot-swappable) sata while booting, and hooked it up again post-boot. I did BIOS flashes, everything, and somehow that got semi-fixed. I can start up (from power down state) with the sata, however, I can NOT just reboot - I need to power my machine down and up again if I want to get into windows with this drive hooked up. I even tried more power (heavier power supply), no use.
Anyhow, I learned to live with it, really. But on this happy day, I decided I wanted Linux back, I still miss it. So I redid some partitions on the sata, with partition magic. It worked, or so it looked. I installed Linux on the sata (my main boot device is the ide, since I didn't dare using the sata for windows LOL), and that where it went wrong. Now the drive seems to be 390GB instead of 250GB in Disk Management, Partition Magic reads it as BAD. And uhm, some partitions which I had deleted are ...back.
That's the status of my drives, and I dont know how to fix it. I believe it's the partition table that is corrupted, but how to solve it, no idea. I think the best is to get a new sata drive, put the files on there, and reformat the current one, but there's the incompatibility issue.
