This is a symptom of an out of date BIOS. I haven't seen the other stuff you've been involved with, so there are some other possibilities, but that would be my first guess.
You can ususally load a drive overlay (probably free from the drive manufacturer) called disk manager that will reconstitiute the drive addressing to regain the full drive.
You might also want to do a google search for "drive limitations" to see what is causing this. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
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