5 Jul
2006
5 Jul
'06
10:10 p.m.
On 7/5/2006 at 10:15 PM Don Y wrote:
Most laptops/drives are compatible with traditional
IDE "desktop" drives (via an appropriate adapter cable).
Does anyone know how backward compatible these drives
are with legacy machines? Assuming I can hack the
BIOS to recognize the drive (since most laptop drives
are much larger than older BIOSes could support),
are there any other issues to be concerned with?
Depends on where you draw the line on the term "laptop", Don. Some of the
very early models used ATA drives, but performed 8-bit I/O on data
transfers to and from the sector buffer. Modern IDE drives will only do 16
bit data transfers. Another gotcha is that very early ATA drives sometimes
got things wrong. IIRC, eary Maxtors on the IDENTIFY command, swapped the
words in the "total sectors' field. Fortunately, the CHS values as
reported are correct, so it might not matter.
Cheers,
Chuck