Seagate Hard Drives not detected by the Windows 7 installer

I've spent hours on this trying every conceivable reason, so I apologize in advance for the length on this post.

I connected a Seagate 320GB 7200.10 hard drive to a P35 chipset system and attempted to install Windows 7 RTM onto it. The installer got to the part of detecting hard drives, but could not detect this drive. Native SATA mode was enabled, and AHCI was enabled.

I disabled Native SATA mode, then after that failed I also tried disabling AHCI by setting the controller to IDE mode. Still, the Windows 7 installer refused to detect the drive.

I replaced both the SATA & power cables, verified the drives are detected by the AHCI firmware and the BIOS, and I even tried different motherboard SATA ports to no effect. I took a second , identical Seagate 320GB SATA hard drive, this time pre-formatted it inside Windows 7 RC using NTFS defaults, and again (with and without AHCI and Native SATA mode) Windows 7 will not see this hard drive either!

I even downloaded the AHCI preinstall drivers and loaded these using a flash drive. When I did Windows 7 would autodetect the ICH9 driver and I would click Next. Windows 7 would suddenly see the drive, but all options to format or create a partition are grayed out. Clicking the more info button gives me this error message:

• 
  [ ] "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu."
  

I used the AHCI preinstall drivers specific for the motherboard (Vista 64) and I also tried the AHCI preinstall drivers from Intel for Windows 7 RC 64. As of this writing Intel has not released official Windows 7 RTM Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers.

In frustration I installed a SSD (with AHCI and Native SATA mode enabled) and suddenly Windows 7 detects the SSD without needing to load any driver (as would be expected, since Vista and 7 include Intel Storage Manager drivers by default already). I installed Windows 7 RTM 64bit onto the SSD without issue.

15 minutes later I was at the Windows 7 desktop, and Windows 7 was showing the Seagate 320GB hard drive under "My Computer" as normal. I could even use the Seagate hard drive as normal as if nothing was wrong. For kicks I launched the Windows 7 installer inside Windows 7, but as you can see below it still refused to see the drive, despite the drive being shown under My Computer:

(Since I can't use thumbnails, here's the direct link: http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n129/Chanur64/Box/Howpossible.jpg )

Also I should note I previously had Windows 7 Beta installed on an IDE drive in this exact system, and had no problems with it. Windows 7 RTM would allow me to install to an IDE drive and allowed me to install to an SSD, but it cannot see and cannot install onto both Seagate 320GB hard drives. These Seagates are known good drives previously part of a RAID 5 array.

If anyone knows what is going on or has some ideas I've not tried I would love to hear from you and get this figured out. Suffice to say this is not a promising start for Windows 7.

Intel Q6600

Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 (ICH9R southbridge)

4GB DDR2-800

2x Seagate 320GB SATA 7200.10

Intel X25-M 80GB

8800GTS 320mb

PC Power & Cooling 750w PSU

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