Difficulties with a DiamondMax VL 40 Ultra DMA 100

I'm trying to install this 40 GB ide drive into a Vectra VLi8. The (up to date) BIOS can't auto detect it and according to the manufacturer I must use C/H/S=16383,16,63 in the BIOS. The true numbers are C/H/S=79408,16,63. I've used the forced numbers, but I only see 8.4 GB. Worse, even if I use that setting, I can't get mke2fs to work: # mke2fs /dev/hdb1 mke2fs 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09 mke2fs: No such device or address while trying to determine filesystem size I have tried passing the kernel parameter: hdb=79408,16,63. Created a partition and still the same problem. Can someone make a suggestion? -- Rafael