Chapter 2 WINBIOS Setup
45
Standard Setup,
Continued
Entering Drive Parameters You can also enter the hard disk drive parameters. The drive
parameters are:
Parameter
Description
Type
The number for a drive with certain identification parameters.
Cylinders
The number of cylinders in the disk drive.
Heads
The number of heads.
Write
Precompensation
The actual physical size of a sector gets progressively smaller as the track
diameter diminishes. Yet each sector must still hold 512 bytes. Write
precompensation circuitry on the hard disk compensates for the physical
difference in sector size by boosting the write current for sectors on inner
tracks. This parameter is the track number on the disk surface where
write precompensation begins.
Landing Zone
This number is the cylinder location where the heads normally park when
the system is shut down.
Sectors
The number of sectors per track. MFM drives have 17 sectors per track.
RLL drives have 26 sectors per track. ESDI drives have 34 sectors per
track. SCSI and IDE drives have even more sectors per track.
Capacity
The formatted capacity of the drive is the number of heads times the
number of cylinders times the number of sectors per track times 512
(bytes per sector).
Cont’d