This is not normal behavior. Are you sure there is nothing else wrong with the motherboard or the disk controller?
There should be a small partition on the disk that has zeroshell on it. Actually you should have 3 partitions. The first one is very small (~16MB), the other one is larger (~128MB) and the third is the rest of the image, though you can expand it to get the rest of the drive with fdisk, mkfs.ext3 and label the partition as “Profiles”.