access to BIOS of DECpc

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Thu Oct 21 14:53:23 2004

> I find it strange that there is no option to change the HDD type or
> parameters. I've seen other laptops (mainly toshibas) that lacked HDD
> options in their setup utils, but they detected the HDD on bootup, no
> settings where needed.

For what it's worth, here's how I solved this problem. I have
an older ASUS motherboard that doesn't support the 120GB drive
I bought, even with the latest BIOS flashed in.

I actually found two tricks, that may work on other
machines. Note that I use only one partition, and I boot linux,
no mixed-OS complexities here.

One, install two hard disks, where drive0 is known to the BIOS,
and drive1 is manually set to "NONE". BIOS finds drive0 OK,
boots from it, and the OS is configured for two drives. The
BIOS is only used a tBOOT TIME> I got all hung up on trying to
get the BIOS to auto-discover geometry, and finally caught on.

Two, I found that really, the BIOS only needs to know enough
disk geometry to read enough sectors of the front to boot. It
doesn't need to get at the higher cylinders at all -- LIE and
tell it that there's fewer cylinders. The OS gets its info from
the partition table.

I find it hard to believe that even early PCDOS's use the BIOS
calls for disk access beyond booting.
Received on Thu Oct 21 2004 - 14:53:23 BST