Partitions can make whole drives inaccessible, as if they failed

After setting up some partitions via fdisk in Linux and rebooting, the GA-P35-DS3R F13 BIOS hung while detecting the SSD. The Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop didn't hang, but it reported an error when I put in that SSD. It seemed as if the drive failed. Then I booted Linux with the SATA cable unplugged, and plugged in the cable while Linux was running. The drive was detected and it worked perfectly. Overwriting the partitions in the MBR with zeroes caused it to be detected by the BIOS. Of course that's not a solution because I need that partition.

The solution was overwriting the CHS addresses with FE FF FF bytes. That is the same value used for CHS addresses beyond the 8GB limit, where only LBA can be used. Modern software should always be using LBA anyways, so the CHS shouldn't need to be correct.

This is probably a bug Intel ICH9R BIOS.

Here is the partition which triggered the bug: 80 41 02 00 07 00 33 0D 00 10 00 00 00 20 03 00