Unfortunately, this lists consistently eludes being entirely up to date, but it should get you started.
Hale Landis ( landis@sugs.tware.com ) has written a number of "how it works" documents dealing with boot sectors, MBRs and partition tables. These are available in a ZIP archive from ftp://fission.dt.wdc.com/pub/otherdocs/pc_systems/how_it_works/ . Also, he has an extensive description of BIOS types, invaluable for programmers, a "Facts and Fiction" series that dispels a couple of common myths, and more. These, together with the How It Works documents (in case you cannot FTP) are available from his mail server; to get started, send an e-mail message
To: hiw@sugs.tware.com help end
ftp://fission.dt.wdc.com/
, a Western Digital FTP site,
contains loads of material pertaining to the SFF Committee, the ATA,
ATA-2 and ATAPI standards, the Phoenix Enhanced BIOS spec, and
archives of the various reflectors (mailing lists, such as the ATA-2
and ATAPI lists). Look in /pub/standards/; the SFF stuff is
in /pub/standards/sff/specs/, the x3t13 in
/pub/standards/x3t13/. The mailing lists themselves can be
accessed through
majordomo@dt.wdc.com
; send a message
To: majordomo@dt.wdc.com help end
to get more information.
ftp://ftp.symbios.com/pub/standards/io also contains information about ATA, ATA-2, ATA-3, SCSI-2 and many more standards. ftp://www.ptltd.com/pub/phoenix_docs/ has many Phoenix specs such as their Enhanced BIOS document.
ftp://hddtech.millcomm.com Tech sheets (I really have to take a look there someday).
Other pointers are appreciated.
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