------------------------------------------------------------ IDEINFO.EXE Version 1.0 5/26/91 ------------------------------------------------------------ (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 drive(s) are jumpered incorrectly and a warning message is displayed: *** Warning: Only one drive found and Its addressed as Drive 1. The number of cylinders/heads/sectors displayed is generally the drive's "native" values. These are the physical values used internally by the drive. The interface accepts logical parameters from the System (as defined in the CMOS drive type and Drive Parameter tables) and translates them into the drive's physical parameters. Some drives (Seagate ST-1144 for example) will return the same parameters as the System's. This occurs because the drive varies the number of sectors per track based on it physical location on the disk (called "zones"). ----------------------------------------------------------- Copyright Notice ----------------------------------------------------------- This program and documentation is copyrighted by Thomas J. Newman. The program and documentation in its complete and unmodified form may be used freely and uploaded to other BBSs, but may not be resold without written permission from the author. If you have any comments, suggestions, or question about this program, please send an e-mail message to the author through Compuserve: 71246,1573
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