I KNOW somebody here has had this happen before. Maybe someone (Issachar?) might have some insights. Here goes.
I recently bought a 10G hard drive for my desktop system at home. I already had a 1.6G as the master and a 3.2G as the slave. I replaced the 1.6 with the 10.
While in FDISK, I noted that the new drive's size was reported as 8.4G. Not a great surprise. The machine is 3 years old. Has a Slot5 motherboard which, even with the latest BIOS flash, can't see anything beyond 8.4G.
I'm going to upgrade the mommieboard, memory, and processor later. Iss, I kept a copy of your post to the "Is it Christmas yet?" (Heresy! I put the question mark inside the quotes!) thread regarding your 233MHz setup.
The weirdness is: the ONLY floppies that I can boot with are the original "system disk" that came with the machine and its copy. None of the DOS boot floppies, which used to work, or the Win95 startup disks, which also used to work are bootable.
The machine goes through its hardware checks, spins the floppy, then just sits there.
Bizarro.