Welcome to legacy computing.
You've stumbled into the infamous 528MB barrier. As you've seen, older (pre-1994) system bios' such as your 286 can't see over 528MB. In the old days you had a number of options.
1) new bios w/LBA. Too expensive back then, and probably a little tough to find today.
2) disk manager to handle the problem in software. probably similarly difficult to find today, although it's possible your manufacturer still has it buried somewhere on their website (samsung still has theirs available for download, only works with their drives, though).
It's been way too long since I dealt with this problem (this was my small computer shop heyday!
), but it seems like we'd boot from the disk manager, install whatever it was into the boot sector, and it would play tricks on the bios to see the rest of the drive. Even then we were stuck because dos or earlier windows (pre-win95) versions still couldn't see the larger drive, so if a customer wanted the large drive we usually split it into 2 partitions. My memory's a little sketchy though. Not sure how minux might affect this, it might even include it's own translator, but I haven't messed with it, sorry.
If you can find a copy of your drive manufacturer's workaround (it's bound to be somewhere in this internet mess), that's the most likely option. Hopefully it has instructions, I'd hate to try and guess them 15 years later. Maybe somebody has a dusty, crusty copy if you post your drive. I think there were one or two commercial products that worked across multiple drives, but our drives always came with drivers, so I never used the third party products.
Otherwise, you could just set it up as a 528 partition and let the rest go, but that's not much fun, either. Hope this gives you some ideas, though.
Good luck!
Update: Found this site, might be of some help as well:
http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/hdd/spaceMB504-c.html
