4 months ago i found an old direct tv dvr box(its not old it was just unused)it had a 500 gb wd500avvs.
i had an old dell dimension 3000 with no sata at the time so i bought a via vt6421a pci card (i bought 1 and 2 came in hehe). so i plug it in my pc and it does not show up in bios or windows. so i stopped using it. but i still left it connected. and yes i tried the jumper on 1.5 gbps
about 2 months ago i was going to re install windows. i was using gparted (boot cd like linux used to make, edit,and delete partitions) and all of a sudden the other 500 gb hard drive pops up. so i check it and it had an xfs partition or something(i really dont remember the format)so i delete everithing on it and put it in ntfs and after i install windows and all the drivers. but no hard drive shows up. but when i installed ubuntu it showed up.
recently i deleted some stuff i shouldent have on my windows partition so i used spotmau (boot cd like linux but to recover data and undelete partitions) to recover it so after i restart ithe hard drive finally shows up in windows but when i shut down the computer and turn it on again it dissapears. i have to boot up spotmau and restart to get the hdd. since then ive been using it to store my xbox 360 backups.
first i thought it was the pci card drivers or something but now i have a friend whose hp slimline s3713w desktop tipped over and the hard drive failed. so i re erase the hdd with gparted to put the hdd in that pc and the hdd dosnt show up in a sata computer either not on bios so i put spotmau , turn pc off , turn it back on and the hdd appears in bios and in windows 7 setup. i installed w7(windows 7). when i turned the pc off it dissapered again . so now every time i want to use the computer i have to boot off spotmau , turn off computer , and turn it back on so i can use w7.
im thinking that because direct tv uses some kind of linux the hdd is made for linux especially.
I am thinking the same lines as you it may have been linux file formated and because of this you may need to go back to the gparted program and use it to format the drive and make the file system a FAT 32 disk and the try and see if windows picks it up if it does then try using windows to do another format to NTFS and that should solve the problem.
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If it's still not recognized in the BIOS:
From experience, I can tell you that at least in older machines, the BIOS does not add HDD's on PCI expansion cards to the list. It is only handled by the OS.
Drive not recognized in Windows:
If the drive is formatted using Linux (e.g. EXT(2,3,4)), Windows will not detect it. It must be formatted in a way that Windows can understand, e.g. FAT32 or NTFS.
