The problems you are having do not stem from a developer/consumer mismatch as far as I know. You are looking at drive/cable/solder-joint troubles, or perhaps a disk drive that was not properly partitioned/formatted. Are you SURE the builder image got run on the drive? Are you SURE it really did format the drive and didn't just give you a message that the drive wasn't blank and sat there waiting for the "enter" key?
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Tony Fabris