undetected drive

Hi,
  First off allow me to ask for forgiveness in advance if the following 
questions are dumb...I'm new to this area and I'm stuck.
I've been given a Maxtor 60G hard drive to practice/develop my forensics 
skills. This drive has previously been analyzed by professionals. I've 
imaged other drives before using dd and I typically use the tools on the 
Helix incident response CD to do my analysis.
The problem I'm having is that this particular drive is not recognized 
by the BIOS on my machine. By that I mean that the BIOS is unable to 
figure out the geometry of the drive. I'm pretty confident that it's not 
an issue whereby the BIOS can't deal with the size since:

a. I already have a much larger drive (200G) on the machine,
b. I downloaded the PowerMax tool from Maxtor, created a boot floppy and 
it can't find the drive either. I had the jumper settings on CS and I 
tried Primary master and slave connections. I know its not the cable 
since I can plug other drives into it without a problem.
c. I tried the drive in another machine with an IBM BIOS and it doesn't 
find it either.

So...my questions are...

1. Are there techniques that I am not aware of whereby a disk can be 
made "non detectable"?
2. Does anybody have any other suggestions as to how I might access the 
data on this disk?

Thanks in advance.

Eamonn