Ampro Corporation LITTLE BOARD 5001451A - Manual (Page 70)

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cylinder. The drive manufacturer supplies these parameters. The list contains “legacy values”,
standard for PCs — a number of older (smaller) drives are defined.
Drive type USER lets you enter drive parameters manually. If no built-in drive type matches your
drive, select drive type USER and enter the drive parameters in the fields provided.
Drive type AUTO selects Autoconfigure. Autoconfigure queries the drive for its parameters. Most
modern drives will respond to the query, allowing the BIOS to set the drive parameter values
automatically. This option also provides Logical Block Addressing (LBA) capability, which is used
to support drives larger than 512MB.
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 BIOSs, LBA-compatible
drives that have been 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 are likely to be usable on the Little Board
P6d CPU. This only applies to IDE drives that support LBA mode.
Consult the technical literature for the drive you select to find out if it
supports LBA mode.
Drive Selection
Besides specifying the physical characteristics of each IDE drive, you must also specify whether a
drive is a master or slave drive. The first drive in a system is always configured as a master drive.
A second drive would be a slave drive. Each manufacturer may use a different scheme to handle
the master and slave relationship, so drives from different manufacturers may not be compatible.
Be sure to test drive compatibility in systems with two IDE drives.
Drives default to master from the factory, so if you only have one IDE drive in a system it is
generally already set up properly.
Once you have set the system’s configuration memory, the IDE drive(s) can be formatted and
otherwise prepared normally. Refer to your operating system and disk drive documentation for
specific procedures and requirements.
Floppy Drives
The ROM BIOS supports all of the popular DOS-compatible floppy disk formats. This includes all
the 5-1/4 inch and 3-1/2 inch floppy formats — 360K, 720K, 1.2M, and 1.44M.
Drive Parameter Setup
Enter the number and type of floppy drives in the system. If the drives connected to the system do
not match the parameters in the configuration memory, POST displays an error message. To
eliminate the error message, set the drive parameters to match your floppy drives.