Thanks for the help, guys. I had to coach him over the phone. He couldn't find a jumper setting in the manual for cylinder limitation, and I couldn't try to talk him through flashing the BIOS cold

No controller card either.
I tried getting win2k setup to format the disk into some 5-gig bitesize pieces, but to no avail.
After all this, I found out he is replacing the rest of the system in a month, so I told him to put the old 4 gig drive back in and just deal with that until he gets a new one

Sheesh.