I got the latest Bios to work version 1.07 but I used the flash utility AF535A.exe and not AF.exe and you cant just run the AF535A.exe and type the name of the bin file as it throws an error message at you, so type, "AF535A.exe 54ALV107.bin /py oldbios.bin /sy" this made a display showing the flashing progress and then it asked to reset or power down the computer, I went from version 1.06 to 1.07 but the bios still cant see drives over 8.3 GB and when you run the flash utility I had to run it with conventional memory only so no emm386 or himem.sys

8 GB is the limit of E-IDE with no LBA mode available. I don't think there are 486 mainboards out there that do LBA. You can get around by using a Disk Manager or by putting the XT-IDE BIOS inside the machine, e.g. by installing it into the boot ROM socket of a NIC.

I have updated my motherboards bios but it didnt go as well as I hoped, im trying to get passed the bios limit for the hard drive which only has a maximum of 8GB. Is there a way to get about 32GB by way of a custom or hacked bios? If not are there any programs to bypass the Bios to get 32GB? Ive used DDO software that worked well but I will also be using a boot manager to dual boot Dos/win 3.11 and Windows 98se the motherboard I have is a GA-5486AL and the CPU is an AM5x86 P75 @ 133MHz

Isn't 512MB limit for normal CHS access? Only LBA supports anything over that and there are planty of 486 boards that have LBA support. But usually the other limit is 4 or 8GB.

No.

IDE = CHS with 504 MB limit (ST-506 emulation)
E-IDE = CHS with higher values allowed = 8 GB limit
LBA = 128 GB limit with 28 bit and 2 TB limit with 48 bit

derSammler wrote:

8 GB is the limit of E-IDE with no LBA mode available. I don't think there are 486 mainboards out there that do LBA. You can get around by using a Disk Manager or by putting the XT-IDE BIOS inside the machine, e.g. by installing it into the boot ROM socket of a NIC.

There are 486 motherboard that do lba ^^

My pcchips m915i from 1995 did, my Acer/Aopen AP43 from 1995 and my SiS 486G 3.3/5v from mid 1994 do too.
I guess most late 486 boards support LBA

Though, warning with LBA : motherboards with an Award bios made before 1999/2000 are limited to 32GB due to a bug

Are you sure you are not confusing LBA with E-IDE? Until 1993, the 504 MB limit was still normal and was slowly taken over by E-IDE with the 8 GB limit. LBA was not a thing back then. LBA was introduced with ATA-1, whose draft was published in late 1994. No mainboard, or rather BIOS before 1995 can do LBA therefore. Now you may have a 486 mainboard from 1994 with a BIOS from 1996 or so which may added LBA. But it wasn't normal for 486 boards to have LBA. Even early Pentium boards had no LBA support.

I checked my Bios (by going into it at boot with del key) and it says at the top:

Rom PCI/ISA Bios (2A4KDG09)
CMOS setup uitility
Award software, inc.

At post it says:

Award Modular Bios v4.51PG, an energy star ally
Copyright (c) 1984-96, Award software, inc.

May 20, 1996 Rev.1.07

it looks like my bios is from 1996 without support for LBA so im looking into trying XT-IDE from what Dersammler said to try is there any other ways to get LBA enabled?

derSammler wrote:

Are you sure you are not confusing LBA with E-IDE? Until 1993, the 504 MB limit was still normal and was slowly taken over by E-IDE with the 8 GB limit. LBA was not a thing back then. LBA was introduced with ATA-1, whose draft was published in late 1994. No mainboard, or rather BIOS before 1995 can do LBA therefore. Now you may have a 486 mainboard from 1994 with a BIOS from 1996 or so which may added LBA. But it wasn't normal for 486 boards to have LBA. Even early Pentium boards had no LBA support.

Well not really, look at this :

12th july of 1994

Although there's few strange things about that : No matter what I chose, in the BIOS setup, the capacity is always wrong (it won't go over 2GB). When HDD is configured to "LBA", I cannot change the CHS settings anymore (and the capacity displayed is once again totally off : say for example 57MB for a 8GB SD card).
I guess this was implemented as an afterthought

One more thing :

Fdisk from DOS 7.1 can't see past 8GB (I used a 40GB drive), so now I'm not sure ... The CHS settings are totally different from IDE or E-IDE in the bios, prehaps this is some "beta" version of LBA ?

it may be a buggy implementation, you can overpass that problem by using something like the XT-IDE bios, or EzDrive software. the latter works perfect in a 386 laptop with a 4GB Compact Flash (otherwise limited to the original 80MB hdd)

Re: IDE to Compact Flash as MS-DOS boot drive.