NTFS has a 4 Terrabyte limitation
NTFS does have a high limit, but most likely the IDE driver in NT 4 from 1995 dosen't know what LBA48 bit addressing is. Try finding a newer NT 4 IDE driver for your existing motherboard chipset, it may elliminate this issue. You will most likely have to load it by pressing F6 when the NT cd boots and first displays the blue screen. It's a hidden key sequence needed to tell NT not to do an autodetect, and instead let you load your own driver. For some reason it is needed quite a bit lately.
If that fails, then yes you will probably have to go down the hardware route to get a controller that can support the drive, and accompanying NT 4 driver.
Why did they put so many limitations into IDE? I look at the fact that a SCSI controller from more then a decade ago can be upgraded from an 80 meg to a 9 gig drive with no issues, but IDE has had storage stumbling blocks left and right.