The thing that makes me believe that the problem is not with the drive is that I've used 3 different formatting utilities on this drive that all reported the size the same way. Also, I've hooked up 2 other drives, one with an operating system already installed, and the other only used for files, and they were both only seen as having 8GB each, despite the fact they were 25 and 100GB drives.

At this point, I must appologize for this thread, because it is completely irrelevant. When I ordered this new machine, I had bought some nice rounded silver cables that would look nice in my windowed case. It appears they have been causing ALL OF THIS. I thought "hmmm, I'll try using the cables the mobo came with and see if that works". I fire up the machine, go into the BIOS, and what do you know? Not only is the name of the device correct now, but it is being reported as 80gigs. What do you think is wrong with the cable? Why would it even effect the name of the device?? That's kinda wierd.

So this still sucks a little, because I now have to have these big, ugly, flat cables in my lovely new case, but it's much better that the thing works.

Also, I got the same cable for my CD drives. do you think those could get screwed up by this too?

I've built several video servers recently, someone else had ordered the parts and had ordered some rounded IDE cables (I suppose in an effort to make the bits move faster!). In every case, I ended up using the flat IDE cables that came free with the RAID card. I found that the some of the individual conductors were starting to work their way loose.
I wouldn't get too pissed off, it's not worth it

LOL

I know newer drives use 80 conductor ribbon cables, but I thought this was to do with DMA or UDMA
i can't see how this would effect the 8gig V 80gig problem you were having
you should be able to get some fancy round 80 conductor IDE cables
as for using these on your CD drives.....should be fine, but then I would never have guessed them causing an issue with the HDD

You may also want to try fdisk /mbr. that'll completely remove the master boot record from the drive. No matter what's on it. It won't appear to do anything, just goves you the prompt back, but it DOES erase the MBR.

In the Bios, don't let it auto detect the drive type. TELL it that the drive is a particular size. you MUST have it in the correct MODE too, most prbably in LBA mode.
The BIOS is probably giving the CHS setting in normal mode. THIS WILL NOT WORK. even in AUTO, tell it that you want to use LBA.

It really is working fine now. Just changing out the cables seems to have fixed it. It was immediately recognized correctly without a need to do anything. The rounded cable that it was connected to seems to be damaged anyway. It seems to have been bent rather extremely at some point, and I don't know how the wires inside did.