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Adding hard disks

Configuring IDE disks and disk controllers

The Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface design consists of an adapter (frequently embedded in the motherboard) connected to a maximum of four IDE hard drives.

The drives are connected to the adapter by a single 40-conductor cable that carries both control and data information.

You must set the jumpers on the drives according to the number of drives installed. If two or more drives are connected, one must be jumpered for master mode, the others for slave mode. A single drive connected to an IDE adapter must be jumpered for single drive mode.

You must also select the ST506 interface on the drive if this can be set using jumpers. Refer to your drive documentation for details.

The embedded controller on most IDE drives can perform automatic sector translation. This allows the drives to be configured with several different head/cylinder/sectors per track settings. You may want to use some settings other than the factory defaults if your drive has more than 1024 cylinders or if the new settings more closely match some drive type in the BIOS. This is an important issue if you are also installing another operating system such as DOS. See ``BIOS support for disks larger than 1024 cylinders'' for more information.


WARNING: Automatic sector translation means that many IDE hard drives should not be low-level formatted. A formatting utility will not understand the underlying hardware of the drive and may render it useless. Check with the manufacturer of a IDE hard drive before attempting to reformat it.


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SCO OpenServer Release 5.0.7 -- 11 February 2003