http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm
I quote from it:
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The 65,536 Cylinder (31.5 GB / 33.8 GB) Barrier
This barrier is relatively recent, and along with a couple of others began
showing up during the spring and summer of 1999. Although this barrier is
often referred to as the 32 GB barrier similar to the one immediately above,
that description is a bit of a misnomer.
This particular barrier is caused by some versions of the Award BIOS not
being able to handle drives having more than 65,535 cylinders. Most hard
disk parameters use 16 heads and 63 sectors, which works out to a capacity
of approximately 33.8 GB or 31.5 GB. It is our understanding that on or
about June of 1999, this problem had been corrected by Award. This is
somewhat of an unusual barrier given that most, if not all, hard disks above
8 GB no longer use discrete geometry for access, instead Logical Block
Addressing is used along with a flat sector number from 0 to one less than
the number of sectors on the drive. No doubt this 65,536 cylinder problem
must somehow be related to some older code that was being used, or a
compatibility issue with older hard drives (or both). From everything we
have been able to examine, this issue was limited to a few machines that
relied upon old Award BIOS code that was subsequently corrected with an
update.
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I don't know if this is the explanation for your problem. The author of the
above seems to state that the problem arose because Award was using some old
code - in 1999! Perhaps your 1997 BIOS isn't compatible with a drive size
that didn't become common until five or six years later.
Something is a bit strange, though. According to the usually reliable
http://www.wimsbios.com/, 2A59I is a code for a 430TX chipset rather than an
HX (2A59F). V3 is indeed the code for Vtech, although I see no PC support
stuff at their web site. Wim's BIOS pages claims that they're the same as PC
Partners,
http://www.pcpartner.com/. The only HX board that PC Partners
lists has an AMI BIOS, not one from Award. There are some TX boards with an
Award BIOS listed. There are mainboard ID numbers provided there, and I hope
that one of them is yours. However, the newest BIOSes listed for the TX
boards (TX was the latest 430 series chipset, I believe) date from 1998.
You might be able to add a HD of arbitrary size by adding on an IDE
controller card
(
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=Non-RAID HBAs&product_id=11),
which I've seen for sale for less than $20 (US). That may be too much to
spend on an old Pentium 1 system, though.
HTH.
Bob Knowlden
Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
