(C) Copyright 1991 Thomas J. Newman. All Rights Reserved
Purpose:
IDEINFO displays information about the IDE (Integrated Drive
Electronic) drives in an AT computer. It issues a standard
IDE drive command that requests information about the drive.
This information is then displayed on the screen.
The information returned by the drive includes the physical
number of cylinders/heads/sectors; buffer size; number of
ECC bytes transferred; and the drive's model number, serial
number, and firmware revision level.
This program would be useful to someone who wants to know
more information about the IDE drives installed in his/her
system. It can also be used as a troubleshooting aid since
it by-passes the system BIOS and accesses the hardware
directly.
Format: IDEINFO (no parameters required)
Remarks:
The program first displays the numbers of hard disk drives
reported by the AT System BIOS (this value is stored in
memory at location 0040:0075). This value will be 0 if no
drives found; 1 for one drive; and 2 for two drives.
Next a check is made to determine if any IDE drives exist.
The main hard disk controller address is check (1F0 to 1F7)
to determine the number of hard drives (0, 1, or 2). The
number of drives found is then displayed.
If any IDE drives are found, a special command (Identify
Drive) is sent to each drive and the information returned by
the drive is displayed.
Note: An error message may be displayed if drives are found
but are connected to an older AT disk controller that
doesn't support the Identify Drive command. This is not a
fatal error, it just means that the drive information can't
be displayed.
*** Identify command was rejected by drive x
The Identify Drive command is not used by the BIOS or the
System for normal operations.
Notes:
This program is only useful when used on AT computers that
use a standard AT drive interface. If it's used with
non-standard disk controllers/drives, it will report the
number of hard drives the BIOS found and report zero IDE/AT
drives found. The program could be run in these systems to
confirm that there is no IDE/AT drives or in systems that
may have an IDE drive plus another type (e.g., SCSI drives).
This program accesses the disk drives by directly reading
and writing hardware registers. This program does not write
to the disk drive nor does it alter any of the drive's data
or parameters.
The IDE Drive interface only supports two drives: Drive 0
and Drive 1. The program does a special check to see if
Drive 1 is present without Drive 0. This means that the
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