I have a 486 SP3, and there are three options in the bios for a hard drive; LBA, Normal and Large. When I go to auto detect the Normal reads “1416 CYL, 16 heads, 63 sectors, 730.7 MB” that is the correct information which is right on the label of the hard drive. Now when I put it in LBA or in Large it reads “708 CYL, 32 Heads, 63 Sec, 730.7 MB”. Now the Large and the normal say 65535 for PRECOMP but the LBA says 0. This drive has nothing on it right now it is formatted, and when I do a scan disk when it is in normal mode it says there are a bunch of bad clusters, and they appear to be growing, when I but it in LBA mode there are no bad clusters. So should I put it in LBA mode even though the information in the bios is incorrect? Oh and it will boot in LBA mode and in normal mode, I have never tried large mode before. Thank You

Usually for a drive that small, Normal should work fine. But since you seem to have fewer problems when it's set to LBA, go ahead and use that one. The precomp shouldn't matter. If you change the drive ID in cmos (and the drive is empty) it'd be best to run fdisk to remove and recreate the partition so it matches the cmos setting. Then use a format/c c: to format, where the /c switch will check the sectors marked bad.

I believe that LBA is intended for any drive over 504/528MB. "This results from the combination of the geometry-specification limitations of the IDE/ATA standard and the BIOS Int 13h standard. The 504 MB barrier is alternatively referred to as the 528 MB barrier, depending on whether you are looking at binary or decimal megabytes"