fzabkar wrote:I would think that any BIOS that supports SATA would be recent enough not to have the 8GB limit of some older BIOSes.
I agree completely
if this system has native SATA support (the OP hasn't said that it does) - and that's why I asked the supplementary questions

There is no sign in the OP's post that this specific coincidence in reported capacity, and that old BIOS limitation, had been considered.
This coincidence might make sense to
them now that I've raised it e.g, is the drive now being used in an old machine (with that 8.4GB BIOS limitation) via a SATA-to-PATA converter board...? Hence my supplementary questions

fzabkar wrote:Could it be that BIOS is calculating the capacity based on the reported CHS parameters rather than the LBAs
Depends what you mean by "reported" - if you mean reading CHS values from the MBR, then I've never seen a BIOS which reads that to report capacity (which, of course, doesn't prove that this isn't possible

). If you mean reported in the Identify Device response, then that would (as you say above) affect any larger drives, and hence doesn't make sense if the BIOS is supposed to support larger drives.
IMHO it all comes back to the OP needing to explain the history of this drive; where it got used before; what is different between that system and the one where it is used now etc. etc. Without that info, then how he/she got to this situation is all guesswork and hence a potential waste of time, if such guesses are wrong...