We took the easy way out and just replaced it with a more reliable Western Digital drive, though upon closer looking at it, there's a jumper going across two pins that Maxtor's site doesn't make any reference of. And this is kind of amusing, because you can write new data to it and remove the new data, but it's like the stuff that was on there before is permanently write protected.
I ran Partition Magic and was able to "successfully" delete the NTFS partition. Tried to create a linux partition and it gave me an error about 77% through. Deleted it, created an NTFS partition and magically it said the drive was about 80% full like it was before I started this whole mess. So I'm like what the hell, let's create a 2gb FAT32 partition. System rebooted. So I figured ya know what, even if it does start to work, I wouldn't trust it any further than I could throw it.
So now I have an 80gb paperweight
