DR> I have noticed new Quantum BigFoot Drives 12gigs for under $350.00.
 DR> This is a very appealing offer to me, and I was curious if anyone
 DR> could tell me if  the BIOS on the FICA's will support a drive this
 DR> large, or am I stuck with 8  gig IDE drives?
OS/2 doesn't rely on the BIOS for performing hard disc I/O, so "BIOS support" 
is largely irrelevant for hard disc drives in OS/2.  
The sole exception to this is that before OS/2's protected mode disc device 
drivers (IBM1S506.ADD and so forth) are loaded at boot time, the OS/2 boot 
loader has to use *something* to read the hard disc.  The "something" that it 
uses is the BIOS INT 13h interface, so it is important that the partition 
containing the boot files be within that portion of the hard disc that is 
accessible via the BIOS INT 13h API.
Of course, you won't find *any* BIOS whose INT 13h API can access more than 
the first 7.87GB of the disc.  This is the absolute upper limit on the 
standard INT 13h API, since it is limited to maxima of 1024 cylinders, 256 
heads, and 63 sectors per track.  There's nothing that can be done to alter 
that.  
There are a suite of *extensions* to the INT 13h API, defined by Phoenix, 
IBM, and Microsoft in 1995, that posess a larger range, which are implemented 
in all of the recent BIOSes from IBM, AWARD, Phoenix, AMI, and MR.  However, 
not all BIOS versions currently in widespread use implement these extensions, 
so a commercial operating system, such as OS/2 Warp, hence cannot rely on 
them (since they are not, yet, the "lowest common denominator").
 ¯ JdeBP ®
--- FleetStreet 1.19 NR
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