Maxtor 160 the drive from hell

This drive was sent to this world just to mess with me, to make my life miserable. So I like to think of myself as a tech, I talk the talk, walk the walk, I do the work. Many many moons ago when I first started this little hemoroid I like to call a business, I took in a E-Machines PC had a bad power supply (big surprise) which took out the hard drive (still not shocking) so the customer brought an old packard bell and asked if I could take the drive from that, I laughed at first then looked at it someone had swapped in a 160 GB Maxtor 6y160Po. Stunned I said sure I'll see what I can do. I popped this thing in and it only shows up as 31.5 odd but must be too big and needs a bios update, do that and still shows up as 31.5. In the bios, in windows install etc. So I tell the customer, look I can't get this drive to function so I'll swap you for a known good 40 GB, he said it was fine, so I held on to it. I tested this drive in 15-20 computers, including my brand new system I built for myself always the same 31.5. So I shelf it, and every once in a while I come back to it, I was formatting some used drives and playing with knoppix

*skip to here for the problem if you don't want the back story** When I booted Knoppix I go to QTParted and as if by magic 155 GB I'm floored I try to format it as NTFS, no luck I play with it some more and it won't format as anything I can tell it that its one format but as soon as I reboot its 31.5 again. I even tried maxblast 4 and 5 which tell me its a 160gb drive and I tried to install from maxblast with still no joy. So once again I'm bored I pop out the 30 gb in my Imac, pop in OS 10 and big surprise its 31.5. I've since given up and I'm leaving it in for now. I'm not asking for help nearly as much as I am ranting. if anyone has any ideas how to get the 120 gb to show up under os X let me know. Otherwise it will be a very expensive 30 gb drive.

 

The drives functionality is not in question, which is all that test will do. by checking its own internal drive test.
Thanks for trying to help

 

yes large volume is set, I've wiped it with all the maxtor tools, I even tried putting it as a slave into a running system with XP with SP2 and the maxtor big drive enabler. Still the same. I hate WD, I like Maxtor, just hate this one drive. OS X doesn't want to install on it.

 

Disk management shows the same, yes I can and have formated, partioned etc. its always 31 Gb or there abouts.

 

Have you tried restoring mbr ? before formatting again - It can be done from XP disc.
I use a little program called Disk Genius, on a cd from pcbeginner, and it solves it easier for me.