I have an old PC from 1999 that has an ASUS P5A motherboard. When I power it on, it says ASUS P5A ACPI BIOS Revision 1011 Beta 005
and 05/02/2002-ALADDIN5-<<P5A>>
:
I recently read that up until 2001 or 2002, there was a 137 GB limitation for hard drives. This PC is showing a BIOS date of 2002/5/2, and I cannot find any information on whether it supports hard drives larger than 137 GB.
I connected a 160 GB hard drive as master on the secondary IDE channel, and then in the BIOS, I told it to auto detect the hard drives. This is what it showed for the secondary master:
I am not sure which of those options to select. But does it even matter? I tried entering in my own garbage values for the secondary master (CYLS=1, HEAD=1, PRECOMP=1, LANDZ=0, SECTORS=63, MODE=NORMAL). Then I booted the computer using the Ultimate Boot CD and ran IBM Drive Fitness Test, and it detected the correct secondary master hard drive model number along with the 160 GB size.
If IBM Drive Fitness Test could detect the hard drive size correctly, does that mean that the BIOS supports hard drives larger than 137 GB?
Also, if a program is able to determine the correct hard drive size despite the incorrect hard drive parameters that I entered in the BIOS, then what is the point of either auto-detecting the hard drive or manually entering the correct parameters in the BIOS?