Bios Flash Memory Organization; Resource Configuration; Pci Autoconfiguration; Ide Support - Intel D815EEA2 Technical Product Specification

Intel Desktop Board D815EEA2/D815EPEA2 Technical Product Specification

3.2 BIOS Flash Memory Organization

The FWH (an SST 49LF004A) includes a 4 Mbit (512 KB) symmetrical flash memory device.
Internally, the device is grouped into eight 64-KB blocks that are individually erasable, lockable,
and unlockable.

3.3 Resource Configuration

3.3.1 PCI Autoconfiguration

The BIOS can automatically configure PCI devices. PCI devices may be onboard or add-in cards.
Autoconfiguration lets a user insert or remove PCI cards without having to configure the system.
When a user turns on the system after adding a PCI card, the BIOS automatically configures
interrupts, the I/O space, and other system resources. Any interrupts set to Available in Setup are
considered to be available for use by the add-in card.
PCI interrupts are distributed to available ISA interrupts that have not been assigned to system
resources. The assignment of PCI interrupts to ISA IRQs is non-deterministic. PCI devices can
share an interrupt, but an ISA device cannot share an interrupt allocated to PCI or to another ISA
device. Autoconfiguration information is stored in ESCD format.
For information about the versions of PCI and Plug and Play supported by the BIOS, see
Section 1.4.

3.3.2 IDE Support

If you select Auto in the BIOS Setup program, the BIOS automatically sets up the two
IDE connectors with independent I/O channel support. The IDE interface supports hard drives up
to ATA-66/100 and recognizes any ATAPI devices, including CD-ROM drives, tape drives, and
Ultra DMA drives (see Section 1.4 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 the
BIOS Setup program.
To use ATA-66/100 features the following items are required:
An ATA-66/100 peripheral device
An ATA-66/100 compatible cable
ATA-66/100 operating system device drivers
NOTE
ATA-66/100 compatible cables are backward compatible with drives using slower IDE transfer
protocols. If an ATA-66/100 disk drive and a disk drive using any other IDE transfer protocol are
attached to the same cable, the maximum transfer rate between the drives is reduced to that of the
slowest drive.
NOTE
Do not connect an ATA device as a slave on the same IDE cable as an ATAPI master device. For
example, do not connect an ATA hard drive as a slave to an ATAPI CD-ROM drive.
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