Here's the problem:

The motherboard is a Aopen (I know) AX6BC Slot 1 Motherboard. The hard drive is a IBM DTLA-307015 15GB Hdd.

The motherboard was getting a checksum error on boot. I saw that the jumper for clearing the cmos wasn't even on either setting, it was missing. I replaced it on the "normal setting" pins 1-2. After that i got rid of the checksum error.

That isn't the real problem, however:
I can run autodetect hdd option, and the hard drive will come up as 15gb's, in lba mode. I can let it autodetect upon boot to see 15gb.

As soon as the machine actually boots, the bios status screen shows the hdd as a UDMA 2, 528mb hard drive. If you run fdisk, it shows the hard drive as 504mb, with a 14gb partition.

I've changed ide cables, updated the motherboard bios, tried putting the hdd on the seconday chain. I also changed the cmos battery as well. No luck. I also tried a new wd20gb drive, which was seen as the correct size, in bios and in fdisk.

The hard drive makes some weird noises when the machine is first powered on, and i have not tried it in a newer/other machine to try and duplicate the erroneous hard drive size seen in fdisk/dos/win9-whatever.

Originally this machine came in for trouble with the internet. It would lock up immediately after launching outlook express 6.0, or surfing the net for a few minutes.

I am somewhat confused as to why this is happening, anyone got a good idea about the hdd issue? I can't even tell if the windows problems and the hard drive problems are intertwined.