OK Does posting this thead get rid of that 'you have not posted' message?

I have had to switch back to old motherboard of unknown - i.e Apollo BIOS - origin that I cannot find updated flasher and will not accept 80 MB hard drive. If I install a limit jumper on Seagate drive will this affect the data now stored?

How do you want to use that HD? I had the same problem (although a BIOS update might have been available for my AMD K6-III system (from 1999 or so)). I added an old 2 GB harddisk and told the BIOS that that's the only HD.

The system is very happy; the 2GB contains the /boot for two OSes (Slackware and Ubuntu) and my 80GB is further fully functional.

I don't think the jumper would do damage to the hard disk.

I also don't think the Bios has an interest on the size of the hard disk because it has no need to read the limit. The motherboard may be limited to the types of UDMA modes it can handle but hard disks are downward compatiable.

Usually it is the operating system that dictates the hard disk capacity that can be accepted unless the mobo is so old that LBA (Large Block Address) is not supported.

@ Saikee

As far as I know a BIOS needs to detect a harddisk to be able to boot from it. And the BIOS on older systems does not necessarily recognize large harddisks (see my post here).

There is also a tip from Electro how to use the cap and still get the full capacity.

I think the 32Gb limit is the addressability of using a predefined limits of the number of Cylinder/head/sector in the hard disk. Since then most Bios switch to LBA. If an old Bios doesn't support LBA then it will not be possible to handle large capacity hard disk.

Lets face it we looking at a problem for which we will never find a solution. First we have no idea what sort of motherboard it is, it could even be a Pentium MMX or earlier. The user did not specify any specs other then a 80MB hard disk (and then I hope the 80MB is in fact a 80GB)

True there in the past, they BIOS with limitations for hard drivers bigger then 32GB, but if we would know the model number of the 80GB hard drive we can maybe point to the compatible setting (Some 80GB hard drives have are capable to fake 2x 32GB hard drives)

So what you say is that I could have added the CHS info manually and it would have worked? Will try that the next time (my board supports LBA).

Did not see that one. But OK, a 80MB will not have a cap limiting jumper.