Anyone out there who is working with old Socket 7 motherboards has likely run into the issue of older chipsets not coping well with large hard drives over 32GB. A solution comes courtesy of the community in the form of patched BIOS updates that can be installed to bump this limit to 64GB or 128GB in most cases.
For a small side project, I dug out an ASUS SP97-V motherboard and built a system around it. The installed firmware was version 0103, which is quite outdated, and as expected, hard drives were only recognized up to 32GB. Since a matching BIOS patch was available, I attempted to install it, which turned out to be anything but simple.
There is a wide variety of flashing utilities available for flashing BIOS files: AFLASH, PFLASH and UNIFLASH, just to name a few. Each of these comes in various versions, and picking the right one is far from trivial. While many ASUS motherboards can be updated using Aflash, not all versions of the tool support every BIOS chip. In the case of the ASUS SP97-V, I tried numerous tools and versions, only to end up failing. None of the programs recognized the ATMEL AT29C010A chip on the motherboard, or the PC would simply crash upon launching the utility.
If anyone out there is facing a similar issue, here is the solution: The official support CD for the motherboard actually contains the matching PFLASH utility. Using this, along with the correct patched BIOS version, the motherboard updated without a hitch. Afterwards, my 128GB HDD worked flawlessly.
You can find the download for PFLASH and the matching BIOS version for the ASUS SP97-V right here:
ASUS SP97-V BIOS 0109 (Patched)
PFLASH.EXE