Eide Devices; If You Have A Problem; Reserved Memory - Dell OptiPlex GXa Reference And Installation Manual

EIDE Devices

For EIDE hard-disk drives, the system provides an
automatic drive-type detect feature. To use this feature
for Drive 0, highlight the Drive 0 category in the Primary
drive section and type a (for automatic); to use it for
Drive 1, highlight the Drive 1 category and type a. In
each case, the category setting changes to Auto. After
you reboot the system, the System Setup program
automatically sets the correct drive-type number and
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
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, access the
Manufacturing Test Report from the Dell Accessories
folder or program group.
To set the drive-type number in the System Setup
program, highlight the appropriate drive category
(Drive 0 or Drive 1 in the Primary drive section) and type
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 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
number at which the electrical current for the drive
head changes to compensate for differences in data
density 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)
indicates 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 Drive 0 category and type u to dis-
play USR1. You can then use the right- or left-arrow key
to switch between the USR1 and USR2 settings (only
two user-defined drive types are allowed). Then press the
<Tab> key to highlight each of the parameter fields in
succession, and enter the appropriate number for each
field.
NOTE: The USR1 and USR2 drive types can be used for
both the Drive 0 and Drive 1 categories in the Primary
and Secondary drive sections. However, if you select the
USR1 or USR2 drive type, you may not obtain optimum
hard-disk drive performance. Also, the USR1 and USR2
drive types cannot be used for hard-disk drives greater
than 528 megabytes (MB) in capacity.

Reserved Memory

Reserved Memory allows you to designate a region of
system board memory that can be supplied by an
expansion card. You should not enable the reserved
memory feature unless you are using an expansion card
that requires special addressing.
For example, you may have a memory expansion card
that needs to be addressed starting at 15 MB. Selecting
the 15M - 16M option in the Reserved Memory category
specifies that the base memory from 15 to 16 MB come
from the memory expansion card (the base memory
Using the System Setup Program 2-5