heh, well... one mystery less. i found the page at http://rtr.ca/bigdisk, so my 250 GB drive is at least functional (sort of) and reading half its size. emplode still won't play nice, but jemplode works ok. (again, at half capacity)

still... as long as the sync is successfull in a bit, this will be enough to get me through the next few days for more googling and searching. I just hope my issues with the forum search feature end soon so i can do more advanced digging here.