Large HD, old BIOS

[Cole Tuininga]

Hi all - a mostly hardware related question for anybody who feels like
fielding it.

I recently purchased a brand new 200G (just ATA 100) drive to use for a
file server at home.  I thought I had a system that would support it,
but turns out the ppro and PII I have sitting around doing nothing won't
cut it.

I bought a motherboard, cpu and memory off a friend (P3 based).  When I
got the system put together, the BIOS (which I did flash to the latest
version) only seems to recognize it as a 8.5 GB drive.  However, even
though the BIOS only sees it as such, several of the distributions I've
tried see that it is indeed a 200GB drive.  Despite this however, I
can't seem to get the boot loader to cooperate.

Am I fighting a loosing battle trying to use this motherboard?  Is it
possible for a distro to handle the drive even though the BIOS doesn't? 
Thanks in advance for helping out a hardware ignorant linux user.  8)

-- 
"... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
 lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of
 their C programs."  --  Robert Firth

Cole Tuininga
Lead Developer
Code Energy, Inc
colet at code-energy.com
PGP Key ID: 0x43E5755D