Chapter 5 AMIBIOS Setup
92
STANDARD CMOS SETUP Options,
Continued
Hard Disk Drive C: and D:
Use <PgUp or <PgDn> to select a hard disk drive type. Not Installed is used for diskless
workstations and SCSI hard disk drives. Type 47 can be used for both hard disks C: and D:, and is
primarily for IDE drives. The parameters for type 47 for drives C: and D: can be different,
permitting user-definable hard disk drives.
Using Auto Detect Hard Disk
If you select the Auto Detect Hard Disk option from the AMIBIOS Main Menu screen, the
AMIBIOS automatically finds all IDE hard disk drive paremeters. AMIBIOS places the hard disk
drive parameters that it finds in the Hard Dive C: or Hard Drive D: field in STANDARD CMOS
SETUP and sets Type 47. All you have to do is accept these values.
Otherwise, you must enter the hard drive parameters, described in the following table. The hard
disk drive type parameters are shown on the following page.
Parameter
Description
Type
The number designation for a drive with certain identification
parameters.
Cylinders
The number of cylinders in the disk drive.
Heads
The number of heads in the disk drive.
Write
Precompensation
The size of a sector gets progressively smaller as the track
diameter diminishes. Yet each sector must still hold 512 bytes.
Write precompensation circuitry on the disk drive compensates for
the physical difference in sector size by boosting the write current
for sectors on inner tracks. This is the track number where write
precompensation begins.
Landing Zone
This number is the cylinder location where the heads normally park
when the system is shut down.
Sectors
The number of sectors per track. Hard drives that use MFM have
17 sectors per track. RLL drives have 26 sectors per track. ARLL
and ESDI drives have 34 sectors per track. SCSI and IDE drives
can have even more sectors per track.
Capacity
The formatted capacity of the drive is the Number of Heads x
Number of Cylinders x Number of Sectors per Track x 512 bytes
(Bytes per Sector).