no such beast

There is no 32 GB BIOS limit. What it looks like is that instead of all three platters (15 G each) only two are found. I had this problem with some Maxtor drives about a year ago and a few hours later the drives were dead. The most common reason for this kind of failure is if the drives were specifically made for OEM Intel based systems and you are running them on a VIA or other chipset manufacturer controller.

Try to run IDE auto detection in the BIOS is such a setting is available and enabale LBA mode in the BIOS. Otherwise, it is a defective drive.