Bios settings differ from hard drive parameters!!

I am new to this site, but am impressed with it's quality.
I have installed a WD 2.6 Gb hard drive into a pentium 133 system, and the bios (under auto detect) wants me to us the LBA settings which are totally different to the drives specs. i.e. Cylinders, sectors, etc are different. When I try to change the settings manually, to the correct cylinders, sectors etc, it sets the drive to normal. Now when I fdisk I ofcourse only get a 504mb partition. I have successfully loaded windows 95b after formatting the drive as LBA, but beleive that the drive is not working properly because of the incorrect bios settings that where attributed to the drive. So my question is: Does it matter that the bios attributes different values to the drive, and can that cause faulty read/write operations??
Thanks
Jim
P.S. Sorry for the lengthy question!!

1. RE: Bios settings differ from hard drive parameters!!
lbyard Jun-27-01 01:06 PM
In response to message 0

Set the BIOS to autodetect the drive in the Standard setup and it should work OK. The operating system has limits on the number of cylinders it can use (1,024). The BIOS is detecting the drive configuration and translating the actual cylinders, heads, sectors to a configuration that the operating system can use. You will probably have to fdisk and format the drive after doing this; however, first, fdisk the drive in the configuration it was in the last time it was fdisk’d and remove all partitions. Then, C:\>fdisk /mbr to restore the manufacturer’s boot record. Finally, fdisk again and format without the /s flag. Larry