Apparently some versions of BIOS for that board had the IDE limit removal fix.
http://www.motherboards.org/forums/viewtopic. … hp?f=22&t=67122

Just reporting back for others on my findings.

With the 2.07.2002 bios still on the board. Putting a 40GB IDE drive the system detects it and moves on quickly. Now when hooking up the 120GB drive it takes about a minute while detecting and then moves onto booting. I then tried again with my 160GB and it does the same but does continue to boot up after a long wait.

Installed the 5.22.03 bios and same thing happens with no improvement even when pulling the battery and clearing all settings. So final answer is that it can detect the larger drive but expect to wait a long time.

@gdjacobs I don't see any IDE removal fix there. Thanks though.

The forum was quoting Epox release notes where support for INT28 LBA was made official. In other words, the BIOS is updated to support drives up to the 137 GiB limit. You're getting support for disks requiring LBA48 (from a BIOS released before LBA48 was official). Don't kick this gift horse in the mouth.

My thanks is real. No kicking happening here.

I appreciate any help there is!

Are all your drives the same manufacturer? In the past, I've noticed that some drives just take longer to settle and respond, or whatever they need to do before being detected.