PC Hardware Arcana

[Richard Royston]

I recently purchased a Western Digital hard drive at a show; so it came 
without a manual or floppy. As it's for a relative's Windows PC I thought I 
should download the manual and setup floppy disk.

The attempt to download the manual started some Java program on my system, 
which immediately crashed my copy of Netscape. Presumably a newer version of 
Netscape will solve that.

The thing that interested me (but not anybody else I've spoken to) was that 
the process caused different PC's to behave differently!

The way the floppy download works is that you download a (Windows) executable 
from Western Digital's web page, put the executable in a directory by itself, 
and execute it; that is supposed to cause the appropriate things to be written 
onto a floppy in your PC. On my PC (an Acer with an Acer BIOS) that resulted 
in failure, accompanied by the message "Disk error on A: drive: Controller 
failed". I tried on a different Acer, with the same result. On a Dell, 
however, I had no trouble.

I imagine that the Western Digital code utilizes some arcane hardware command 
that the Dell BIOS handles O.K., but the Acer BIOS screws up. But, regardless 
of the specific rights and wrongs of this situation, this suggests to me that 
there are a whole lot of things that in theory one should be able to do to a 
floppy that depend on the BIOS, but that not all BIOS's handle the more arcane 
ones the same. They must be pretty arcane, because Windows commands to write 
bootable floppies, and linux lilo and dd commands (that can be used to write 
to the boot sector) all work on my Acer system.

Since I now have the floppy I need, my pragmatic friends tell me I don't need 
to worry. Well, I'm willing not to worry, but I am curious, and would like to 
know more about BIOS's and how they work with hardware to talk to it, and what 
commands floppies deal with. Does anyone know where I can find out? I'd be 
most grateful for some pointers.
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Richard J. Royston                             68 Baldwin Street
richard at aoi.ultranet.com                       Apartment 22
(617) 242-5280                                 Charlestown, MA 02129


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