WANTED: BIOS for >137 GB Drives for old Intel MoBo

[Dr. Bob]

I have an old system with an Intel MU440EX Motherboard with a 266 MHz Celeron that I occasionally use as a platform to test some hardware like hard disks. I currently am testing a HD with a diagnostic utility (from floppy) that takes well over 24 hours to run. Unfortunately this old board doesn't support drives above the 137 GB barrier and the drive I am testing is 160 GB.
I would have liked to be able to use this machine for that test so I wouldn't have had to use another machine as I am doing now that I would have liked to be able to use for other purposes.

The board has the last P11 BIOS that is available from Intel..
Does anyone know of a BIOS compatible with this board that will allow me to get past this barrier and will make the board support larger capacity drives?

It is not important enough for me to be willing to spend any money on this old beast so any commercial solutions are out.

[Dr. Bob]

Hmmm.... Did some more reading myself and am now beginning to wonder whether it can be fixed with a different BIOS. If the IDE (ATA) interface doesn't support it a BIOS upgrade might not be enough.

[Dr. Bob]

No. The Intel Application Accelerator utility apparently allows >137 GB drives to work under Windows on the supported chipsets. This board has a 440EX chipset. Officially this chipset isn't supported but a poster called Petr tells us here and here that it will work with these older chipsets.

So it looks that there should be no insurmountable problems with the hard disk controller. But as I want the large disk support to be native so it will also work under DOS it'll still need to be in the BIOS.