I have a Prolinea 4/33 as well. The BIOS will, for some reason, let you enter CHS values seemingly supporting up to 8GB Disk, however it really only supports 504MB. Therefore, you can sort of do as you say and format it on a different computer, but all partitions have to start before the 504MB mark -- i.e. you could have one partition that was 499MB (ish) and then another partition that was 2GB (both primary partitions). Unfortunately where DOS only supports 2GB partitions, this would be the maximal use of the disk. As long as you don't try to fdisk or format it on the 4/33, this should work fine.

My suggestion, however, is to use an overlay. This is how I use a 4.3GB disk on mine, with 2 x 2GB partitions (Seagate disk, so I use Seagate Disk Manager 9).

Thanks RJDog for the info. That keeps me from beating my head against this yellowed case any longer with this issue. I love this machine and wanted it to be my exclusive 486 machine since i love the case style, but there always has to be a tradeoff. I have another 486 that has an 8GB drive that the system is perfectly happy to natively support 4x2gb partitions but not crazy about the case. Only problem with overlays that I remember is they took more conventional memory than I liked. Ontrack had a documented switch to move the data into the high memory area but when I would invoke it it still ate like 11 k of conventional 🙁 Maybe I will try it again and see if it is different on this machine. Thanks again..