Lanner electronics EM-535 Series, Manual

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AWARD BIOS SETUP
EM-535 / 34
(write pre-compensation), “LANDZ” for (landing zone), “SECTOR” for (number of sectors)
and ”MODE“ for (Normal, LBA, LARGE and AUTO). The hard disk vendor‘s or system manufacturer’s
documentation should provide you with the drive specifications. For an IDE hard drive, you can set
“TYPE” to “Auto” or use the “IDE HDD AUTO DETECTION” utility in the main program screen to enter
the drive specifications.
The AWARD BIOS supports three HDD modes: NORMAL, LBA and LARGE.
NORMAL mode :
This is a Generic Access mode in which neither the BIOS nor the IDE controller will
make any transformation during the accession. The maximum HDD size is supported by the
NORMAL mode that is 528 Megabytes.
LBA mode : This is a Logical Block Addressing mode which is a HDD accessing method to overcome
the 528 Megabytes restriction. The number of cylinders, heads and sectors that are shown in setup
may not be the physical number contained in the HDD.
During the HDD accessing, the IDE controller will transform the logical address that is described by the
cylinder, head and sector numbers into its own physical address as contained inside the HDD. The
maximum HDD size that is supported by the LBA mode is 8.4 Gigabytes.
LARGE mode : Some IDE HDD contains more than 1024 cylinders without the LBA support. This
access mode tricks DOS (or other OS) with the number of cylinders that is less than 1024 by dividing it
by 2. At the same time, the number of heads is multiplied by 2. A reverse transformation process
will be made inside INT13H in order to access to the right HDD address. The maximum HDD size that
is supported by the LARGE mode is 1 Gigabytes.
Note : 1. To support LBA or LARGE mode, there are software located in the AWARD HD Service
Routine“INT13H”. It may fail to access a HDD with LBA or LARGE modes selected if you
are running under an Operating System that replaces the whole INT13H service routine.
2. Entering incorrect drive specifications will result in a hard disk drive that will function
improperly or no function at all.