Yes, you can do that.

Back in the day, this was common practice, even.
If an old CMOS Setup only had hard-coded settings for fixed-disks,
choosing a small drive from the list which was within the specs of the HDD was okay.
Nowadays choosing a setting that does not exceed total capacity also works (CF/DOM and later IDE drives don't care) .

Just keep in mind that not all BIOSes count the same way (some start counting from 0, some from 1).
Using 1023 cylinders, 15 heads, 63 sectors should be safe.

Edit: I forgot something to mention: Never use the low-level formatting feature in the BIOS, it can confuse the drive badly.
Using FDISK and FORMAT in DOS is safe, though. I never got a CF card or HDD broken with them.

It will work but the drive isn't going to be usable in another computer unless you configure the BIOS with the same CHS settings.

LunarG wrote:

I am trying out some old hd's in my 386, and unfortunately they are all larger than the 528MB chs limit. One, a Samsung drive, has a jumper to limit it to 528MB, but it turned out to have lots of bad sectors on it. I've tried out EZ-Drive, and I might end up using that with a larger drive, but since I don't really need a ton of space on this system, I was just wondering: Is it safe to just "soft limit" a larger drive to 528MB using the maximum chs settings? Or would this risk data corruption?
I have never really tried that before, so any input would be appreciated 😀

Seagate and IBM IDE/SATA drive control software allows you to artificially set an LBA limit if a drive causes headaches with your BIOS.