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                        Updated 09 Nov 96

Thanks for your interest in the How It Works documents.  Here is
some late breaking news about these documents, the ATA (IDE/EIDE)
disk drive industry and other things...

                         ---------------
                         * NEW NEW NEW *
                         ATADEMO PROGRAM
                         ---------------

If you really want to learn how the ATA (IDE/EIDE) and/or ATAPI
interfaces work, then you need a copy of this program.  This
program lets you issue commands to your ATA/ATAPI devices,
bypassing all BIOS and OS drivers, and it reports the results of
those commands in several levels of detail.  If you are having
partition sector or partition table problems you may want to
check out the SHOWPT command of this program.  Watch for new
versions of this program that will support the ATAPI Packet
command (command code A0H).  Follow the installation and
operation instructions carefully!

                         --------------
                         GET HIW BY FTP
                         --------------

You may find it faster to get the How It Works (HIW) documents by
FTP...

   ftp://fission.dt.wdc.com/pub/otherdocs/pc_systems/how_it_works

Only the ZIP ALL file (ALLHIW.ZIP) is available at this FTP site.
(The ATADEMO.ZIP file will be available there soon.)

                     -----------------------
                     THE HIW MINI DOCUMENTS:
                     FACTS and FICTION (FnF)
                     -----------------------

A new set of mini HIW documents is now available.  These
documents are called the Facts and Fiction (FnF) series.  They
are mostly small articles that were written to answer specific
questions.  Check it out -- request the FnF Volume 1 today:  FNF1
(only available as an ASCII file).

                    ------------------------
                           * UPDATED *
                    STANDARDS COMMITTEE NEWS
                    ------------------------

Find out what the ATA and ATAPI standards committees are doing.
They don't do much so progress is generally very slow.  Request
the Standards News today:  ATANEWS (only available as an ASCII
file).

OK, I have not updated this document for about a year and lots
has happened.  Watch for a major update with all the latest
ATA/ATAPI/etc news!

                    -------------------------
                    LOOKING FOR THE EIDE FAQ?
                    -------------------------

If you are looking for the very good EIDE FAQ, check out these
sites:

   This FAQ is the work of John Wehman (jwehman@got.net) and
   Peter Herweijer (pieterh@sci.kun.nl).  The most recent version
   is available by FTP from

   o  <ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/cl/clau/ide_ata/>

   o  <ftp://ftp.rahul.net/pub/lps/hard-disk/ya-ata.faq>

   o  <ftp://ftp.wi.leidenuniv.nl/pub/faqs/>

   o  <ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/pc-hardware-
      faq/enhanced-IDE/>

   and finally on the World Wide Web from

   o  <http://www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/ata/>

   You can also get the absolutely latest version by e-mail from
   pieterh@sci.kun.nl by sending a message with "EIDE FAQ text"
   in the Subject:  header.  The body of the message will be
   ignored.  You can replace "text" by "postscript" or "html" if
   you want something more fancy than plain text.  Anything else
   will probably break the mail server and cause it to send you
   an uuencoded coredump :-)

             --------------------------------------
             LOOKING FOR BIOS INT 13 DOCUMENTATION?
             --------------------------------------

The most current documentation for a PC BIOS INT 13 services can
be found at

   http://www.ptltd.com (or ftp://www.ptltd.com)

The document is the "BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive Specification"
(EDD).  Look for a ZIP file with the name "EDDxxx.ZIP".

This document describes the IBM/Microsoft extensions to INT 13
and the Phoenix enhancements to some of the extended INT 13
functions.

The original IBM PC INT 13 supports functions calls 0x (AH=0xH).
The IBM/Microsoft extensions add the 4x (AH=4xH) calls.  Phoenix
has enhanced a few of the 4x calls to return additional hardware
and BIOS configuration data.

Don't be fooled by all the misleading statements you may see that
say OS/2 or WinNT or Win95 or Linux doesn't use the BIOS when
accessing a hard disk.  These statements are false.  All PC based
OS's must use the BIOS to boot (load the OS kernel and some
device drivers) and all OS's must use the BIOS to determine the
hardware configuration of the system (including the CHS geometry
of the hard disks).

Get this document and learn how all this works including some
more information on why LBA is not required to break the 528MB
barrier.

Note:  The Phoenix EDD document does not describe the older INT
13 0x function calls.  Documentation of these can be found in
many books in your local computer book store, for example,
"Undocumented PC" by Frank van Gilluwe.  However, beware that
many of these books, including "Undocumented PC", talked about a
version of INT 13 that can use 12-bit cylinder numbers.  Such
BIOS were never widely implemented and were never supported by
any mainstream OS.

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