HDD Format Failure - weirdest fix

One of my machines is a nice EVGA 680i SLI Motherboard. She's sporting a RAID array of 2 WD Raptor HDDs, Core2Duo 1.86 Ghz overclocked to 2.8 Ghz, and a sexy LianLi case.

She has been my workhorse for a while now and hasn't let me down.

Recently, it has been a dedicated media center that my parents use. My father, becoming as nerdy as me (or maybe i got it from him), purchased a Seagate 1.5 TB SATA HDD: a beauty!  It would NOT take a format under ANY condition. Considering I had a variety of HDDs in there already with an extensive history configurations, I had come to the conclusion that the drive was faulty.  Receiving the replacement HDD, the same problem existed....

I was lost it. How could this happen?  The HDD fails a full format around 73% EVERY TIME, and it would never take a quick format. It also failed the Seagate diagonostics software! The twist: it will format on another machine!

So I decided to try some updated 680i chipset drivers. It fixed the problem immediately. The drive took a quick format, and I started a full format on her just to be sure. I generally expect stability fixes in driver updates, but this is one of the strangest/largest issue I've seen get corrected.

Either way, thanks Nvidia for correcting it.