• Subscribe by RSS
  • Raid Recovery
  • Flash Data Recovery
  • Hitachi Data Recovery
  • Seagate data recovery
  • Samsung Data Recovery
  • WD Data Recovery
 
Data Recovery Salon
 
  • Recovery News & Tips
  • D.R Asia & Oceania
    • Data Recovery Afghanistan
    • Data Recovery Armenia
    • Data Recovery Australia
    • Data Recovery Azerbaijan
    • Data Recovery Bahrain
    • Data Recovery Bangladesh
    • Data Recovery Bhutan
    • Data Recovery Brunei
    • Data Recovery Burma
    • Data Recovery Cambodia
    • Data Recovery China
    • Data Recovery Fiji
    • Data Recovery French Polynesia
    • Data Recovery Georgia
    • Data Recovery Hong Kong
    • Data Recovery India
    • Data Recovery Indonesia
    • Data Recovery Iran
    • Data Recovery Iraq
    • Data Recovery Israel
    • Data Recovery Japan
    • Data Recovery Jordan
    • Data Recovery Kazakhstan
    • Data Recovery Kiribati
    • Data Recovery Kuwait
    • Data Recovery Kyrgyzstan
    • Data Recovery Laos
    • Data Recovery Lebanon
    • Data Recovery Malaysia
    • Data Recovery Maldives
    • Data Recovery Marshall Islands
    • Data Recovery Micronesia
    • Data Recovery Nauru
    • Data Recovery Nepal
    • Data Recovery New Zealand
    • Data Recovery North Korea
    • Data Recovery Oman
    • Data Recovery Pakistan
    • Data Recovery Philippines
    • Data Recovery Saudi Arabia
    • Data recovery Thailand
  • D.R Africa
    • Data Recovery Algeria
    • Data Recovery Angola
    • Data Recovery Benin
    • Data Recovery Botswana
    • Data Recovery Burundi
    • Data Recovery Cameroon
    • Data Recovery Burkina Faso
    • Data Recovery Cape Verde
    • Data Recovery Central African Republic
    • Data Recovery Chad
    • Data Recovery Comoros
    • Data Recovery Democratic Republic of the Congo
    • Data Recovery Djibouti
    • Data Recovery Egypt
    • Data Recovery Ethiopia
    • Data Recovery Gabon
    • Data Recovery Gambia
    • Data Recovery Ghana
    • Data Recovery Guinea
    • Data Recovery Ivory Coast
    • Data Recovery Kenya
    • Data Recovery Lesotho
    • Data Recovery Liberia
    • Data Recovery Malawi
    • Data Recovery Mali
    • Data Recovery Mauritania
    • Data Recovery Mauritius
    • Data Recovery Mayotte
    • Data Recovery Morocco
    • Data Recovery Mozambique
    • Data Recovery Namibia
    • Data Recovery Niger
    • Data Recovery Nigeria
    • Data Recovery South Africa
    • Data recovery Uganda
  • Data Recovery America
    • Data Recovery American Samoa
    • Data Recovery Anguilla
    • Data Recovery Antigua and Barbuda
    • Data Recovery Argentina
    • Data Recovery Aruba
    • Data Recovery Bahamas
    • Data Recovery Barbados
    • Data Recovery Belize
    • Data Recovery Bermuda
    • Data Recovery Bolivia
  • Data Recovery Europe
    • Data Recovery Germany
    • Data recovery France
    • Data Recovery Croatia
    • Data Recovery Denmark
    • Data Recovery Estonia
    • Data Recovery Czech Republic
    • Data Recovery Greece
    • Data Recovery Finland
    • Data Recovery Greenland
    • Data Recovery Falkland Islands
    • Data Recovery Hungary
    • Data Recovery Iceland
  • Donor Firmware
    • Seagate HDD Donor FW
    • WD HDD Donor FW
  • Links
    • How to advertise with Data Recovery Salon?

IDE/ATA Disk BIOS Settings

Since the system BIOS on virtually every PC provides native support for IDE/ATA hard disks, there are a number of parameters that can be set to tell the BIOS what hard disks are in the system, and how to control them. Each hard disk in the system will have its own settings, so there is one set for the primary master, one for the primary slave, and so on. This normally applies only to IDE/ATA hard disks; SCSI hard disks are configured through their host adapter and built-in SCSI BIOS.

Most modern BIOSes support hard disk autodetection, which allows the BIOS to interrogate each hard disk to determine its logical geometry, supported transfer modes and other information. This can be done either at setup time or dynamically each time the machine is booted, depending on the BIOS.

Dynamic autodetection is the standard way of setting up modern drives, especially since drives over 8 GB in size cannot be described using traditional IDE/ATA BIOS geometry parameters. In some situations, especially with older PCs, you may still set some drive parameters manually. The following are the settings normally found in the BIOS setup program for configuring IDE/ATA hard disks. Note that on modern systems some of the oldest compatibility settings may not even be present any more:

* Disk Type: Originally used to allow you to pick your hard disk from a predefined list, this is now used to control automatic or manual parameter setup for the drive. (The old tables describing ancient drives are now often not even present on many modern BIOSes, since they no longer serve any purpose.)
* Size: This is the size of the drive in decimal megabytes. It is calculated from the other parameters.
* Cylinders: The number of logical cylinders on the disk. The value used depends on whether BIOS translation is enabled, in some BIOSes. For a drive set to “Auto”, no number may be shown.
* Heads: The number of logical heads on the disk. The value used depends on whether BIOS translation is enabled, in some BIOSes. For a drive set to “Auto”, no number may be shown.
* Sectors: The number of logical 512-byte sectors in each logical track on the disk. This is usually 63 for modern drives. Again, for a drive set to “Auto”, you may not see a number here.
* Write Precompensation: A compatibility setting that specifies at which cylinder number write adjustments should be made, for very much older drives.
* Landing Zone: The cylinder where the heads are parked by the BIOS when the drive is shut off; not used on modern drives since they automatically park their heads.
* Translation Mode: The BIOS translation mode being used, for support of hard disks over 504 MB. Translation issues are discussed in detail here.
* Block Mode: Controls the BIOS’s ability to perform disk transfers in blocks.
* PIO or DMA Mode: The programmed I/O mode or DMA mode used to perform transfers to and from the hard disk.
* 32-Bit Transfer Mode: Controls the use of higher-performance 32-bit data transfers.

Data recovery Salon welcomes your comments and share with us your ideas, suggestions and experience. Data recovery salon is dedicated in sharing the most useful data recovery information with our users and only if you are good at data recovery or related knowledge, please kindly drop us an email and we will publish your article here. We need to make data recovery Salon to be the most professional and free data recovery E-book online.

 
 

World’s Top Data Recovery Hardware Tools


Easy to use at good price
Recover SATA, IDE, External HDDs, NVME SSDs, etc  Order Now here

POTABLE DEVICE & NVME SSD RECOVERY TOOL

Recover USB Device and NVME SSDs at high speed! Read Details here.

DFL-PCIE DATA RECOVERY RECHARGE

Best data recovery hardware tool to start a data recovery business, read details here

RECOVER SCRATCHED HDDS


Recover lost data from scratched hard drives, read details here.

SURFACE PRO. RECOVERY


Recover Dead Surface Pro. Laptops here

BEST HEAD REPLACEMENT TOOLS


The most cost-effective head replacement tools for Seagate, WD, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu

 
 

Recents Posts

How to Recover Lost Data from WD141KRYZ-01C66B0 Helium Drives

July 9, 2025 7:12 AM / no comments

 

Apple SSD Data Recovery Adapter Pro.

April 30, 2025 3:03 AM / no comments

 

Strongly Recommended HDD ROM Read and Writing Tools

March 22, 2025 7:47 AM / no comments

 
 

Tags

Add new tag advanced data recovery training bad sectors Clean room Computer Forensics data backup data loss Data recoveries from flash and SSD Data recovery Data recovery engineer Data recovery equipment data recovery hardware Data Recovery Jobs Data Recovery Salon Data Recovery Services Data recovery software data recovery tips Data recovery tool Data Recovery Tools Data recovery training Data Security FAT Firmware free data recovery software hdd repair hdd repair tool hdd repair tools Hitachi Data Recovery how to fix logical data recovery NAND NTFS physical data recovery RAID Recovery SalvationDATA salvationdata review Samsung Data Recovery Seagate Seagate data recovery seagate hdd repair SSD SSD data recovery wd hdd repair WD SMR HDD Recovery Western Digital

Data Recovery Links

  • Head and Platter Swap Tools Factory
  • Top Data Recovery Tools
  • Data Recovery Australia
  • Data Recovery South Korea
  • Data Recovery France
  • HDD Repair Tools
  • Hitachi Global
  • Maxtor Hard Drives
  • PC Guide
  • Samsung Hard Drives
  • Seagate Technology
  • Storagere View
  • Toshiba Storage Device
  • Western Digital

Author

Sebean Hsiung
 
  • Raid Recovery
  • Flash Data Recovery
  • Hitachi Data Recovery
  • Seagate data recovery
  • Samsung Data Recovery
  • WD Data Recovery

Copyright © 2025 Data Recovery Salon. All rights reserved.