jakethompson1 wrote on 2026-07-11, 18:32:The easiest way to do this is to boot from a DOS floppy with a program on it that can ask the IDE drive for its settings.
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The easiest way to do this is to boot from a DOS floppy with a program on it that can ask the IDE drive for its settings.
HWINFO16 from Mumak who posts on the forum can do it: Introducing HWiNFO16 (for 8086/88/186/188/286)
"WHATIDE" was a commonly used tool as well.
I know you were having trouble getting it working in another thread, and using a tool like this will be a more straightforward way of verifying it's working than trying to interpret errors during POST.
That's all correct, the question is if an 286 BIOS supports user-definable settings (type 47) or not.
And how high the values are it can support.
In the past, the BIOS and CMOS Setup used to be independently written.
The Setup would happily accept and calculate some values that the BIOS wouldn't support.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, when HDD types were limited,
it wasn't uncommon to choose an HDD type with values that are within the limits of the HDD.
With newer IDE HDDs that used logical addressing (ca. 1990 onwards), the main concern was to simply stay within maximum capacity (MB).
And not to exceed BIOS/IDE limitations. 1024 cylinders (0 to 1023), 16 heads (0-15), 63 sectors.
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