Eide Devices Other Than Hard-Disk Drives; Eide Hard-Disk Drives; If You Have A Problem - Dell Precision 410 User Manual

EIDE Devices Other Than Hard-Disk
Drives
For EIDE CD-ROM and EIDE tape drives that use the
built-in EIDE controller, it is recommended that you use
the secondary EIDE interface connector if a hard-disk
drive is attached to the primary EIDE connector.
For all EIDE devices, set the appropriate Drive category to
Auto.

EIDE Hard-Disk Drives

For EIDE hard-disk drives, the system provides an auto-
matic drive-type detect feature. To use this feature for
Drive 0, highlight the Drive 0 category and type a (for
automatic). To use it for Drive 1, type a at the Drive 1
category. In each case, the category setting changes to
Auto. After you reboot the system, the System Setup pro-
gram automatically sets the correct drive parameters for
each drive.
Before installing a new EIDE hard-disk drive, also check
the documentation that came with the drive to verify that
all jumper settings on the drive are appropriate for your
configuration.

If You Have a Problem

If the system generates a drive error message the first
time you boot your system after installing an EIDE drive,
it may mean that your particular drive does not work with
the automatic drive-type detect feature. If you suspect
that your problem is related to drive type, try entering
your drive-type information in one of the following
ways:
•
If you know the drive-type number, you can type it.
•
If you don't know the drive-type number, you can
enter your own parameters.
See the next two subsections for instructions.
If You Know the Drive-Type Number
Use the drive-type number you found in the documenta-
tion that came with the drive or, if the drive was installed
by Dell when you purchased your system, on the manu-
facturing test report that was shipped with your system.
To set the drive-type number in the System Setup pro-
gram, highlight the appropriate drive category (Drive 0 or
Drive 1) and type in the correct drive-type number. If you
prefer, you can press the right- or left-arrow key to
increase or decrease, respectively, the drive-type number
until the correct one is displayed.
If You Do Not Know the Drive-Type Number
The Drive 0 and Drive 1 categories display the following
seven parameters for each drive type:
•
Type is the drive-type number for the selected hard-
disk drive.
•
Cyls is the number of logical cylinders.
•
Hds indicates the number of logical heads in the
drive.
•
Pre (precompensation cylinder) is the cylinder num-
ber at which the electrical current for the drive head
changes to compensate for differences in data den-
sity across the disk surface (this parameter has no
effect for EIDE drives).
•
LZ is the cylinder number that is used as the
drive's landing zone for the heads when the drive
is not in use.
•
Sec is the number of logical sectors per track.
•
Size (automatically calculated by the system) indi-
cates the number of millions of bytes of storage
provided by the drive.
If none of the supported drive types match the parameters
of your new drive, you can enter your own parameters. To
do so, highlight the appropriate drive category (Drive 0 or
Drive 1) and type u to display Usr1. You can then use the
right- or left-arrow key to switch between the Usr1 and
Usr2 settings. Then press the <Tab> key to highlight each
of the parameter fields in succession, and enter the appro-
priate number for each field. You can have only two
user-defined drive types.
NOTE: The Usr1 and Usr2 drive types can be used for
both the Primary and Secondary Drive 0 and Drive 1 cat-
egories. However, if you select the Usr1 or Usr2 drive
type, you may not obtain optimum hard-disk drive perfor-
mance. Also, the Usr1 and Usr2 drive types cannot be
used for hard-disk drives greater than 528 megabytes
(MB) in capacity.
Using the System Setup Program 3-5