West digital wd3200avjs hard drive is wacko!

Hello guys..i am new to this forum so if placed this thread in the wrong place..please tell me and i will do my best to correct it

my problem

I recently rescued a WD3200AVJS (western digital) hard drive from the pit of doom (local landfill).the other day
and upon placing it in my computer some strange things happen
1.the bios "detects it,but all its information is 0's..everything! everything youd expect to see under say Vendor,model number serial number,LBA,Type of drive etc etc...its all 0s...so thats telling me that the BIos is seeing something on the SATA1 port..it just doesnt know what it is.
2. it will not reveal itself under windows Vista or XP or Ubuntu 12.10..nothing shows up at all.

so i did some research and found that this drive is common to DVR and whatnot made by companies like Dish and Direct. and i also found that alot of these drives are commonly put into PUIS mode..Power up In standby..which i guess works for a DVR but does crap for PC users. So with more searching i found a program that would allow me to turn this feature off..(HDAT2 using the W/switch).and VIOLA it did indeed help alot..the bios was able to see it and all of its information and it even revealed itself in Disk management under windows Vista.
But..somewhere along the lines it started disappearing from disk management here and there when i would go to format it.also one of its other problems was it would misreport it size..its a 320gig hard drive but disk management would only see it as a 297.8 gig hard drive (thats alot of gigs to loose!)
so,i figured that PUIS or some other power management feature was popping up and shutting the drive off intermittently .so i went back in under HDAT2 hard drive utility prgram but found there was very little i could do (or understand) to shut any kind of power management features off..I did however find two sections that explored
1 was Automatic offline
and the other was HPA (host protected area)

i had figured perhaps there was a hidden reserve partition on the drive that was hiding all those left over gigs that seemed to be lost under windows management..so i set the feature to "remove" and under the automatic offline i set it to disabled.
but upon rebooting..the same ole same ole happen..nothing in bios,and nothing in windows..but now a new set of problems! now when i bring up HDAT2..it only sees it as a "PCI DEVICE" and offers no information on it such as vendor or model number or serial number or any other juicy bits of information. and not matter what i try it allows no commands to perform at all..
my question to you is could of changing these simple features been the cause of messing it up? (ive read about others removing HPA and having no ill effects...not much info on disabled automatic offline out there)
or
has the firmware somehow been corrupted? and if so how can i go about reloading the firmware when the drive and computer are not getting along to well and the computer cant tell what kinda drive it is?

the bios of my computer still sees it..but in its "dumb mode" where everything is all zeros,and when i reboot up into the HDAT2 program..it still sees it as "PCI device".


any and all help and all information is greatly appreciated.

thank you very much

Keith.