Reply 20 of 26, by Jepael
wrote:Currently, it is configured to "Auto Detected". Other available options are "Standard CHS" (for drives with fewer than 1024 cylinders), "Extended CHS" (for drives with more than 1024 cylinders), and "Logical Block" (LBA). The BIOS does not show what selection it actually performs when I choose auto detected. Since LBA is supported, I could try forcing the BIOS to use it as this is the latest IDE translation mode it supports.
I also suggest trying LBA, then extended CHS. Do try Standard CHS most likely limits the size to 504MB, because drives with less than 1024 cylinders do not need geometry translation and they are smaller than 504MB.
wrote:Thanks for the explanation, very interesting indeed. When I have some time within the next few days I'll try to manually configure it using the 1023/255/63 setting to see how that gets interpreted. When I first configured it manually, I used the 16 heads and 63 sectors variant.
Most likely you are not allowed to enter 1023/255/63 because this setting is the specs how the BIOS will access the drive, and ATA has only 16 heads. So drives larger than 8GB have xxx cylinders/16 heads/63 sectors, and BIOS translates that to 1023 cyl/255 head/63 sectors so DOS can see up to 8GB of it.