LBA28 BIOS workarounds for drives larger than 137GB?

[Swiss]

I had the need to put together a file server that I want to keep up in my loft. A friend of mine kindly donated an old HP Pavillion he had lying around so all I hoped to do was whack a nice 250GB hard drive in there.

After hooking up the drive I noticed that the BIOS is only seeing it as a 137GB drive. So I thought oh, the BIOS/IDE Controller must only support LBA28. Bit of research on the mobo (Asus K7M) and yeah, LBA28. I downloaded the latest BIOS and flash tool (From 2000 - Doesnt look good) but HP have kindly flashed the EEPROM with a proprietory BIOS and is write protected unless flashed with their tool - Either way, doesn't look like I will be getting LBA48 going with a BIOS flash.

The hard drive in question is a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (250GB / 16MB Cache), so I booted into Maxblast and it recognised it as a 250GB drive, so I used Maxblasts 'Drive setup tool' (or whatever its called) and partitioned the drive into two 125GB NTFS partitions (I have XP installed on a seperate 13GB drive).

Upon booting into XP, it recognises my two partitions, buggers around and reboots itself. When it had finished re-booting, I checked in My Computer and I have two drive partitions sitting there at 125GB a peice.

Now, I'm just wondering, will these two partitions be stable and error / corruption free? Or has MaxBlast just fooled XP into seeing the drives as capacities that they actually arn't?

I'm copying over some stuff to the partitions now, anything I can run to check the integrity of the data? Tests to see if its all stable and error-free? Would I have to fill up both 125GB partitions 100% before I can start to test?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Splash]

TBH once free space in a partition is reduced to less that 20% performance will be impacted - I'm not familiar with the Maxblast software, but I see no reason why a drive split into 2 partitions should have any major stability issues.

[Swiss]

TBH once free space in a partition is reduced to less that 20% performance will be impacted - I'm not familiar with the Maxblast software, but I see no reason why a drive split into 2 partitions should have any major stability issues.

My major concern with stability was because the BIOS only supports LBA28 drives, and I'm using a 250GB drive (LBA48). It doesnt find all 250GB in the BIOS, but it does in XP. I was wondering, when I fill the drive up and over the 137GB mark, would a start to see data coruption and stability issues?