Question No.1 : is this a 2.5" or 3.5" disk ? And if it is the later, are your sure power is o.k. ?
The form-factor may seem to be irrelavant, it also gives a hint on the age of the drive.
Lots of drives from the early 90's had a lousy implementation of the "read layout from disk" feature as x86s of these days didn't use them. 3.5s are more likely to have these probs.
Back in the days I tried a 170MB Connor in my A1200 (3.0), which would work just fine for 5-10 boots, but would then come back as a predifened type with 20MB... ONLY way to fix that was to fdisk it on a PC :-o Had to go back to the 60mb 2.5" :-x :-x
It sounds quite possible that 2.x has even more probs with interpreting such garbled layout-info than 3.1-ROMs.