Ampro Corporation 486E - Manual (Page 92)

Little Board™/486e Technical Manual
2–76
To configure the system for one or two IDE drives, set the drive parameters with SETUP, as
outlined here:
! Drive Types—The configuration memory contains a default list of parameters that specify the
physical format of each drive. Each type specifies the total number of cylinders, number of
heads, cylinder to begin pre-compensation, landing zone cylinder number, and the number of
sectors per cylinder. The drive manufacturer supplies these parameters. The list contains
legacy values, standard for PCs—a number of older (smaller) drives are defined.
1. Two special drive types, 48 and 49, let you enter drive parameters manually. If no built-in
drive type matches your drive, select drive type 48 or 49 and enter the drive parameters in
the fields provided.
2. Drive type AUTO selects Autoconfigure. Autoconfigure queries the drive for its
parameters. All IDE/ATA drives respond to the query, allowing the BIOS to set the drive
parameter values automatically. This option also provides Logical Block Addressing (LBA)
capability, which supports drives larger than 512M bytes.
Note
LBA uses a translation scheme to convert physical heads, sectors and
cylinders to logical block numbers. Due to differences in the
translation schemes used by different system BIOSes, LBA-
compatible drives that were formatted on Ampro systems may not
function properly in other systems that support LBA mode. However,
due to the intelligent translation algorithm in the Ampro BIOS,
drives formatted in other systems may be usable on the
Little Board/486e CPU.
! Drive Selection—Besides specifying the physical characteristics of each IDE drive, how they
are to be used by the ROM BIOS must also be specified. Two factors control how they are used,
drive number jumper(s) and the DOS disk map.
1. An IDE drive can be jumpered as a master or slave. Each manufacturer’s drive is different.
Refer to the drive’s technical documentation to find out how to jumper the drives. Drives
default to master from the factory. If a system has only one IDE drive, it is generally
already set up properly.
2. Use the SETUP Extended Hard Disk Configuration menu (SETUP page 3) to enter the IDE
drive(s) in the DOS disk map. Disk 1 in the map is logged by DOS as drive C, Disk 2 as
drive D, and so on. See the description of SETUP page 3 for details.
Once the system’s configuration memory is set, the IDE drive(s) can be formatted and otherwise
prepared normally. Refer to the O/S and disk drive documentation for specific procedures and
requirements.