cfdisk ATA HDD Compaq

I have one of the F750US Compaq laptops that I got to replace an old crusty Dell laptop. Now these PC's have Windows Vista Preinstalled. I was trying to create my partitions (preInstallation) using the cfdisk application on 12.1. I am currently only able to read the harddrive as a readonly through the cfdisk application, but I was able to modify the hard drive using XP and OpenSolaris. Has anyone seen this problem before.

1. Is there a flag on my BIOS causing this?

2. I am thinking of trying cfdisk on Slack 10.

3. Any other thoughts.

I have never had this problem before and I am completly baffeled.

Thanks.

I have also totally trashed any and all of the NTFS installs and kept and entire HDD with a raw setting. The BIOS is the PheonixBIOS and this lastest version of the BIOS has less control then it's predecessors. I cannot even scan with the BIOS for HDD's! So with the Solaris OS gone and an entire HDD with a raw setting thanks to Windows 2K. I still have a cfdisk that will not accept a write from the cfdisk application.

I will keep updated with information.

With the cfdisk from 10, the partition didn't work. At this point it did see a point and only the 660 MB of true Unpartitioned space. Would this be because of the ATA harddrive (HDD) architecture?

So in the past I have used exclusively IDE hard drives. On my laptops and desktops. Rarely have I used SATA drives or connections. Meaning that in Linux or slackware never had the mount the sda devices. So when doing the Linux install you:

cfdisk /dev/sda

giving you control of you hard drive. This was really confusing me mainly because the cfdisk application reported a 680 MB storage space. This lead me to believe that this was only part of the entire partition, which originally was 100 GB and a partition of a Vista/Compaq recovery disc that I placed onto 3 DVD's.

Once the cfdisk has partitioned a Linux and a swap partition. Write, quit, and run setup, then you know the rest.