Bios Upgrades; Plug And Play: Pci Auto-Configuration; Pci Ide Support - Intel AN430TX - Motherboard - ATX Technical Product Specification

AN430TX Motherboard Technical Product Specification

3.1.2 BIOS Upgrades

Flash memory simplifies distributing BIOS upgrades. You can install a new version of the BIOS
from a diskette. BIOS upgrades are available to be downloaded from the secure section on the
Intel bulletin board or from Intel's FTP or World Wide Web sites (see Section 5.2).
The disk-based Flash upgrade utility, IFLASH.EXE, has three options for BIOS upgrades:
Update the Flash BIOS from a file on a disk
Copy the current BIOS code from the Flash EEPROM to a disk file as a backup, in the event
that an upgrade cannot be successfully completed
Compare the BIOS in the Flash device with a file to make sure the computer has the correct
version
The upgrade utility ensures that the upgrade BIOS extension matches the target computer to
prevent accidentally installing a BIOS for a different type of computer.

3.1.3 Plug and Play: PCI Auto-configuration

The PCI auto-configuration utility operates in conjunction with the Setup program to let you insert
and remove PCI cards without user configuration (Plug and Play). When you turn on the computer
after adding a PCI card, the BIOS automatically configures interrupts, I/O space, and other
parameters. Any interrupts set to "available" in Setup are considered free for use by PCI add-in
cards. PCI interrupts are distributed to available ISA interrupts that have been not been assigned to
an ISA card or to system resources. The assignment of PCI interrupts to ISA IRQs is
nondeterministic. An ISA device cannot share an interrupt allocated to PCI.
PCI configuration information is stored in ESCD format. You can clear the ESCD data by moving
the CMOS Clear jumper (see Section 1.13.3).
For information about the version of PCI and Plug and Play supported by this BIOS, see
Section 5.1. You can obtain copies of the specifications from the Intel World Wide Web site (see
Section 5.2). Peer-to-peer hierarchical PCI Bridge is supported, and by using an OEM-supplied
option ROM or TSR, a PCI-to-PCMCIA bridge capability is possible as well.

3.1.4 PCI IDE Support

If you select "Auto" in Setup, the BIOS automatically sets up the two local bus IDE connectors
with independent I/O channel support. The IDE interface supports hard drives up to PIO Mode 4
and recognizes any ATAPI devices, including CD-ROM drives and tape drives (see Section 5.1 for
the supported version of ATAPI). The BIOS determines the capabilities of each drive and
configures them to optimize capacity and performance. To take advantage of the high capacities
typically available today, hard drives are automatically configured for Logical Block Addressing
(LBA) and to PIO Mode 3 or 4, depending on the capability of the drive. You can override the
auto-configuration options by specifying manual configuration in Setup. The ATAPI Specification
recommends that ATAPI devices be configured as shown in Table 41.
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