Just plug an 8gig drive in and see it it is detected and boots.

8.4 Gb limit is a bare minimum you can expect from any late 486 or early Pentium board. Also it fits in vanilla DOS 6.22 limitations - 4 partitions, 2Gb each.
Some boards can identify larger drives properly even if they display them incorrectly in BIOS.

Sadly not always the case. I have a 1996—dated 486 board that supports 5x86, yet LBA doesn't work so it's limited to 512MB HDDs, and many early Pentium boards have the 2GB limit. There are also more or less common 3.2GB and 4GB limits you might hit.

Bottom line is not to make assumptions and have a plan B. As I network all my systems, an XTIDE ROM on the NIC is my preferred plan B.

I had 30 GB HDD on Intel TC430HX and it worked, no problems.

Sometimes your bios might display weird capacity and still being able to use bigger drives. My DX4 from 1994 can handle up to 8GB HDDs without special software (such as ontrack boot manager or ez-drive) but the bios will only show 2GB. Actually it's just capacity (mod) 2GB, so a 4GB drive will be shown as "0mb", but in reality it's properly recognised.

I'd say just try and look what it does. The absolute maximum limit for 90's pcs is 128GiB, many will fail before though, but many limitations can be overtaken by software.

dionb wrote:

As I network all my systems, an XTIDE ROM on the NIC is my preferred plan B.

The best way of doing it! You're truly a gentleman and a scholar! 😁

Quick article explaining the limits
https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-dri … pacity-limits/6

Your sizes look fine in general but as always you always get exceptions. The old "give it a go" is still the best method.

You can go up to 137Gb even in a 8088 with XTIDE.

Set Cyl/Head/Sectors below the supported boundary and just install a Drive Overlay.
If you like Software Solutions.

Some ancient Controllers will not work but this are buggy chips anyway (CMD640 for example..)

On my P6XBL i run a 80Gb Harddrive and a 120Gb without Problems 😀