8 gig i believe; there were many versions of lba

It's not just LBA but firmware specific bugs which matter.

I've seen mostly 8GB ones, but also some 32GB ones.

Never saw more than 8GB though make sure to check Wims Bios site for a hacked/updated BIOS regardless.

appiah4 wrote:

Never saw more than 8GB though make sure to check Wims Bios site for a hacked/updated BIOS regardless.

FIC 486-VIP-IO latest BIOS if I remember correctly (I believe it was an official update, not an unofficially patched ROM).

I don't know model of the motherboard, but it seems to have quite new bios. Bios is award bios from 1996, which means it is newer than some pentium bios that I have seen.

Basically I am being offered an unknown really small looking slot 3 motherboard for 20 euros. Only seen couple pictures of it. It has 3 ISA slots and 3 PCI slots. It has headers for IDE, Floppy, serial and parallel ports. It has only 2 slots for ram. It has coing battery and Award bios (c) 1996 bios ship. My main roadblock for building something from it is if I don't have a small enough hard drive for it.

I think I might have one if there is a chance it would support up to 32Gb hard drives.

Bios is award bios from 1996

8gb limit, 99% sure. It is a common limitation even on pentium boards of that time.

Actually I've not seen many pentium boards limited to 8GB, but that's probably pure luck

8GB is a very good luck.
I have had several 486 mobos with a 2GB IDE hdd limit on my 486 motherboard AWARD bios with its LBA support. 😀
Also this one which has both PCI and VLB has the 2GB IDE limit.
Thus I have always solved the IDE limit problems by going-scsi.

PEntiums... some have 8GB, some have 32GB limit, but they are fixable by their BIOS patch on some models. Also in cases with over the limit HDDs the motherboards reaction may vary. Some of them freeze during boot, others just do not use entire HDD area, or are making errors.

Thank you all. I'll have to go through what hard drives I have exactly when I get home to see if I can do anything with that motherboard right now.

I have a 486-laptop with LBA support, which only supports up to 4GB. I think the hard drive capacity limit is more likely to be 8GB in most situations though.

Both IBM/Hitachi and Seagate/Maxtor/Samsung lines of HDD can be LBA limited via their respective config tools. I recommend that approach if they're not naturally limited to 8gb.

I have an old 486 with a low LBA limit (just 504 MB I believe). I use a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) to get around it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_drive_overlay
In my case I use EZ-BIOS, which was supplied by Maxtor I believe.
It doesn't work on all machines (couldn't get it to work on my Compaq 486), but it should work with most generic machines.
I also use it on a Pentium 133 with 8.4 GB limit, running a 20 GB disk in there.

It's quite simple really, the DDO just installs into the boot sector of your drive, and contains a patch for the BIOS LBA routines.
So you boot from a floppy with the DDO software on there, transfer it to the HDD, then reboot from the HDD, which loads the BIOS patch. You can transfer the booting back to a regular DOS floppy from that point, and then format the disk and install DOS.

My Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus supports hard drives up to 3.2GB in size and any more than that can make the BIOS think the HDD is smaller or not detected at all. I use the XT-IDE Universal BIOS for the hard drive(s) bigger than 3.2GB in size. I have a Quantum Fireball 3.2GB HDD that gets detected, but, it's on the fritz. My previous 486 detected a hard drive up to 7.8GB, but, Windows NT 4.0 with SP6a installed made it possible for me to have bigger storage on my 80GB HDD at that time, and my K6/2-300 supports up to 32GB storage.

Are there ISA or PCI I/O cards with their own bios that would allow a 486 to have a larger hard drive?

Baoran wrote:

Are there ISA or PCI I/O cards with their own bios that would allow a 486 to have a bigger hard drive?

Yes, XTIDE Univeral BIOS, for example. Or IDE Enhancer cards (8-Bit ISA) with their own BIOS.
Not sure if XTIDE has an 8GB limit, though. I lost track about current releases of it.

Jo22 wrote:

Baoran wrote:

Are there ISA or PCI I/O cards with their own bios that would allow a 486 to have a bigger hard drive?

Yes, XTIDE Univeral BIOS, for example. Or IDE Enhancer cards (8-Bit ISA) with their own BIOS.
Not sure if XTIDE has an 8GB limit, though. I lost track about current releases of it.

To add to this, you can use a standard NIC (LAN) card which has its own Boot ROM socket. You can then burn the XT-IDE BIOS on an EEPROM chip and use the NIC card to boot with the XT-IDE BIOS.
Last time I checked, the HDD size limit was something like 127 GB (http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?297 … -testing-thread)

"Use the source, Luke!" - Obi-Wan Kenobi

http://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/