Specifications

Software Configuration
3–5
3.4.1 IDE Hard Disk Drives
The ROM BIOS supports up to four hard disk drives connected to the IDE interface. IDE CD-ROM
drives and other IDE-interfaced peripherals are configured by software or drivers supplied separately.
Only hard disk drives are directly supported in the system’s ROM BIOS.
Physical drives can have one or more logical partitions. You can install up to eight logical drives using
drive partitions. (Older versions of DOS may limit the number of logical drives you can install.)
To configure the system for the IDE hard drives in your system, 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 precompensation, 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.
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 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 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/P5i CPU. Note that 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 how they are to be used by the ROM BIOS. Two factors control how they are used: cabling
and drive number jumper(s).
1. Two connectors are provided for connecting IDE drives to the Little Board. The first, J12,
provides the standard signals necessary for the first two IDE drives. If you wish to connect
additional IDE peripherals, make a cable using signals from both J12 and J17 as described in
Chapter 2.
2. An IDE drive can be jumpered as a master or slave. Each manufacturer’s drive can be different,
so you must refer to the drive’s technical literature to find out how to jumper the drives you
install. Drives default to master from the factory, so if you only have one IDE drive in a system it