hard drive recognition troubles
 

ok what i have is a Seagate ST340823A 40 gig IDE hard drive. the odd thing is that the installer (of iatkos v7) doesn't see the drive, however the partition utility does see the drive, and when i try to format the drive to mac os extended, the partitioner draws a partition map and then hangs right when it starts the formating.

i've just run out of ideas of where to go from here.

Get gparted Live CD - it should be able to create HFS volumes. :)