The bios will likely support 2.1G or 8.5G.
I think the bios will be problem, but it's worth a try, maybe manual configuration will help. Just make sure it's right, according to the drive geometry.
See if the hard disk supports it's own bios, not a great thing in my opinion, but was a very popular option back in the "upgrade the old 486 days".
Of course the best thing may be to go with the boot loader to start with, if it will work.
nuni is a non-bios bootloader
I like this howto, very good info
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-1.html