[ale] 386 vintage '89 BIOS

[foxtrot at cc.gatech.edu]

> I'll try it with 980, 5, 17, 300 precomp and see if that works.  What do the
> LZ and the precomp do? 

I've never been completely certain-- write precomp was used back in the days
of MFM and RLL devices, the landing zone was the track where the head was 
supposed to go when the disk was "parked", IDE disks "auto park" the heads off 
of the media area of the disk anyhow.

> How do you figure out how many blocks (1048K??) there are per sector?

A sector on an IDE drive is, if I recall correctly, 512 bytes.  So your
980, 5, and 17 disk (roughly 83,000 sectors) would be about a 40 meg disk.

-JDF
--
J.D. Forinash                           ,-.  
Georgia Tech College of Computing CNS  ( <  
211 CCB; (404)-385-0391                 `-'
The more you learn, the better your luck gets.