UPGRADING REPAIRING PCs

Table 4.13 Bus-Mastering Chipsets by Vendor and Operating
System Continued
Benefits of Manual Drive Typing 111
Vendor Chipsets Driver Source by Operating System
PCChips Various See www.pcchips.com to look up IDE
motherboard drivers by model and operating system
models (Windows 95, 98, and Windows NT 4.0).
Ali Aladdin III Windows 95/NT
(Acer Aladdin IV
Labs) Windows
(see note)
Aladdin V
Aladdin Pro2
Linux
www.acerlabs.com
95/98/NT
All Intel chipsets that contain a PIIXn device (PIIX, PIIX3, PIIX4, PIIX4E, and so on) are busmastering
chipsets.
Although PCChips chipset names are similar to certain Intel Pentium chipsets (Triton series TX,
HX, and VX), the drivers listed are strictly for PCChips chipsets, not Intel’s.
ALi (Acer Labs) recommends checking with motherboard manufacturers’ Web sites first for drivers
because drivers might be customized for a particular vendor’s products.
Benefits of Manual Drive Typing
Even though virtually every BIOS used since the mid-1990s supports
automatic drive detection (also called drive typing) at startup, a
couple of benefits to performing this task within the BIOS configuration
screen do exist:
• In the event that you need to move the drive to another system,
you’ll know the drive geometry and translation scheme
(such as LBA) that was used to access the drive. If the drive is
moved to another computer, the identical drive geometry
(cylinder, head, sectors per track) and translation scheme
must be used in the other computer; otherwise, the data on
the drive will not be accessible and can be lost. Because
many systems with autoconfiguration don’t display these settings
during the startup process, performing the drive-typing
operation yourself might be the only way to get this information.
• If you want to remove a drive that is already in use and the
BIOS displays the drive geometry, write it down! Because the
IDE interface enables a drive to work with any defined geometry
that doesn’t exceed the drive’s capacity, the current BIOS
configuration for any given drive might not be what the
manufacturer recommends (and what would be detected by
the BIOS, using the IDE identify drive command). I ran a
203MB Conner drive successfully for years with an incorrect
BIOS setting that provided 202MB, because technical information
about drives in the early days of IDE wasn’t always