Seagate Momentus Not Recognized in Windows Setup

Alright guys recently I took a foray into mac osx 10.6 on the asus eeepc and since I am avid at changing os' sometimes more often than I change my underwear I had no qualms with dropping the recovery partition like a bad habit. And after playing with osx I decided to go back to windows, so I launch the osx install again and format to fat and then reboot and run xp from the thumbdrive. Well i fudged up when doing the thumbdrive so I tracked down the holder of the key to the IT room and found an external cd rom drive and think all is well. Still a no go doesnt see the hard drive, oh well no biggy pop in backtrack4 sd card and boot into gparted format to ntfs and back to the cd rom drive. Still no hard drive detected... wtf... back to gparted which i now realize is only reading 149.something gb. OSX installer sees 160. So I get into more detail and realize that gparted is also recognized 5 partitions but only showing 2.

I HAVE NO CLUE WTF is going on please help this is the first time I have been stumped. Damn netbooks..

OKay just an update and a plea for help again. Formatted with osx again zeroing out data and now gparted recognizes the full drive instead o f just formatted size as being the size of the drive in total. Problem still remains that windows refuses to recognize the drive in any type of accepted partition. Does anyone have any idea what I can do to fix this?

Try using gparted or DBAN to completely wipe the drive. It sounds like you might still have an EFI loader on there that's screwing with Windows. Windows setup will work just fine with a completely bare drive, so don't worry about partitioning and formatting it before running setup.

I cleaned the efi off I left it unpartitioned as a bare 160 gb drive and windows still didnt like it. I have tried a few different methods booting form usb and even went as far as tracking down an external drive. I havent tried dban (completely forgot about it,) this just completely baffles me why it wont recognize the drive. Thanks for reminding me of dban and I will try that and see what happens.

What version of Windows are you installing? With Vista and 7 if you're working with a completely bare drive it's not a very intuitive process to add a partition. Or does it not identify that there's anything hooked up at all?

you could always go to a local university and ask them to degauss it...

Trying to install XP SP3 embedded, problem is not a single windows install recognizes the hard drive, bare partitioned or otherwise. Haven't tried DBAN yet because well I am lazy and I spent the weekend just me and the wife.