Old Award BIOS and HDD support

[BiosMan]

I've found that all Award BIOSes dated July 1994 or later correctly support the LBA assisted translation up to the 8 GB limit. There is however a bug in the BIOSes dated before January 1996 that limits the harddisk size display, on the BIOS Setup and boot screens, to 2015 MB.
Whenever a drive is 2016 MB or larger, the display starts to count from zero again. The same happens at 4032 and 6048 MB.
This looks a lot like a 2 GB limit bug, but is actually only a bug in the harddisk size calculation routine, and it doesn't affect the BIOS support for these large drives.
For these Award v4.50(P)(G) BIOSes, just use the HDD AUTO DETECTION feature to Setup the drive, select the option with LBA at the end, and disregard the incorrect HD size display.

For more information on the subject, see my "The BIOS IDE Harddisk Limitations" article on http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/bioslim.htm

Jan.