It really depends on BIOS. For hardware of this era there are 2 limits: 8GB or 32GB. If you are lucky you can find modded bios with those restrictions removed.
If your BIOS vendor is AWARD, you can patch it by yourself using BIOS Patcher from http://www.rom.by/
http://www.rom.by/articles/BP/index_english.htm

Also many 40GB / 80GB harddrives (and larger) had jumper to limit its capacity to 32GB.

Thank you, that answered all the questions I had!

Just checked my BIOS, it's AMIBIOS 1.00.04.BSO. Any way to find out what it supports?

According to internet your motherboard is Intel Zappa.
So there is for sure version 6 of the BIOS (now you have 4). There is also version 11 for Gateway 2000 OEM of this board. http://r3tr0.de/mirror/ftp.mpoli.fi/hardware/ … NTEL/index.html
I would try to flash this bios.

You can also use a drive overlay software to get around drive size limitations or use a NIC or other card with the XT-IDE BIOS or other similar LBA supporting BIOS to get around size limitations.

According to Intel archived page, final bios version for this motherboard (not OEM) is 6 http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/AdvancedZP/

I found this BIOS here: ftp://soporte.uson.mx/DRIVERS/TARJETAS_MADRE/ … el/10006bs0.exe

Here are more informations about this motherboard: http://intel-vintage-developer.eu5.org/DESIGN … BD/ZP/INDEX.HTM

Funny, I recently got the same board for free. There's also a Mr.BIOS avaliable. Haven't tested it and the board is in storage now I believe the Mr.BIOS supported larger HDDs.

zyga64 wrote on 2020-05-29, 20:59:

According to Intel archived page, final bios version for this motherboard (not OEM) is 6 http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/AdvancedZP/

I found this BIOS here: ftp://soporte.uson.mx/DRIVERS/TARJETAS_MADRE/ … el/10006bs0.exe

Here are more informations about this motherboard: http://intel-vintage-developer.eu5.org/DESIGN … BD/ZP/INDEX.HTM

Wow, thank you so much!

I freaking love this forum, you guys are great. Thanks everyone!

Just one more question - will the BIOS update delete my start up splash screen? The splash screen is the logo and name of the computers original manufacturer and has nostalgic value to me 😀

Show us photo of the splash screen !

I think you can make a backup of that bitmap with the same tooling that is used to load it in there. Let me think where that went 15 years ago...

zyga64 wrote on 2020-05-31, 18:30:

Show us photo of the splash screen !

Here you go!

evasive wrote on 2020-05-31, 20:03:

I think you can make a backup of that bitmap with the same tooling that is used to load it in there. Let me think where that went 15 years ago...

So would it be possible to restore it if the BIOS update erases it? I'd like that a lot 😀

On Intel boards this is usually preserved during BIOS update as the image is located outside of the area flashable by fmup.exe with default settings. As far as I remember there was a separate utility for flashing OEM logo.

But if you care, do a backup. Should live between EC000H and ECFFFH addresses.

There ya go. This tool apparently has no backup options so yes, make a backup of the original user area as described in the previous post and check if that is indeed as expected.

Dos 6.22 has the Fat16 /2GB partition limit.
Also remember its a partition limit not drive. So you could have multiple 2GB partitions to use up more of the drive.

If you use Dos7 that comes with Win9x you'll also get Fat32 and go beyond the 2GB limit.
You don't even have to install Win9x just use a bootdisk to create a a bootable partition.
easiest way is boot from disk and type format c: /s

My TC430HX that i got off of ebay has a custom BIOS logo too.

mpe wrote on 2020-06-01, 09:05:

On Intel boards this is usually preserved during BIOS update as the image is located outside of the area flashable by fmup.exe with default settings. As far as I remember there was a separate utility for flashing OEM logo.

But if you care, do a backup. Should live between EC000H and ECFFFH addresses.

how to do it ? Should we use debug ?

zyga64 wrote on 2020-06-02, 05:22:

mpe wrote on 2020-06-01, 09:05:

On Intel boards this is usually preserved during BIOS update as the image is located outside of the area flashable by fmup.exe with default settings. As far as I remember there was a separate utility for flashing OEM logo.

But if you care, do a backup. Should live between EC000H and ECFFFH addresses.

how to do it ? Should we use debug ?

I would like to know this aswell. I'm a complete noob with these things, so I'd really appreciate instructions.

Also how can you restore it after the BIOS update, if the update removes the splash screen?