One of my friends had an interesting weekend figuring out why his brand new ASUS motherboard with the Z68 intel chipset didn't want to cooperate with the SRT technology (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Response_Technology ). Well, he had to resize a random partition, than restore it back to the original size. The reason for this is still voodoo AFAIK, something related with toucheing the MBR maybe.