![]() This PRECOMP value is set to the lowest cylinder at which the controller is to use different timing for writing. Since the area of the disk closest to the spindle has smaller sectors than those at the outer edge, write precompensation alters the timing of when the hard disk writes its data to the disk. ![]() Each cylinder is equidistant from the centre of the disk. A cylinder is comprised of a set of tracks described by all the heads (on separate platters) at a single seek position. A track is a collection of sectors under which the head sits and reads. A sector is the smallest section of a disk that is written to, with a predefined number of bytes, often 512, written to each sector. You're basically telling the BIOS what capacity hard disk you have through these three values: the number of cylinders, the number of read/write heads, and the number of sectors per track. This explains more about CHS (Cylinders, Heads, Sectors), which is what you set here. Here you set the system's date and time, and the configuration of the hard disks and floppy disk drives.įor information on the hard disk configuration, read the Hard Disks page. Do bear in mind that the settings you see, and the screen layout, will possibly differ from the illustrations shown here. The first, and probably most critical screen in a BIOS Setup utility is one like that shown below. If in doubt, try holding down one of the keys on your keyboard to cause a "keyboard error" - this will usually stop the boot process and offer the option of going into your Setup. Usually a message on the screen informs you of what key(s) to press to "run Setup". The BIOS configuration firmware is accessible on most PCs during the initial boot process by pressing a key or combination of keys. For this reason, the BIOS settings and configuration are often referred to as CMOS settings or CMOS configuration. These motherboards and all that came after, had a CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) chip in a socket on the board - basically this chip is non-volatile RAM (it doesn't lose its data when power is off) - which stored these BIOS settings even while the computer was off. One early example of this is the NEAT (New Enhanced AT) chipset, developed by Chips & Technologies Inc. With the introduction of the 80286, some manufacturers began putting software on a ROM ("firmware") so that the configuration settings could be accessed without any configuration being previously set, e.g. Other early PC-compatible manufacturers also wrote their own BIOS setup utility and provided it on floppy disk with the computer. With the introduction of the IBM PC/AT in 1984, more settings needed to be stored so IBM provided a setup program on floppy disk which would allow the user to set the BIOS settings. The first-generation PCs (IBM PC and XT) only had a few settings so these were set via switches or jumpers on the motherboard itself. These beep codes are bespoke to your BIOS manufacturer, and can be looked-up in full elsewhere on the Internet, but here are a few of the more common ones:- AMI BIOSġ, 2 or 3 beeps, or 1 long-3 short = Memoryġ long-1 short, or 1 long continous = Memoryġ-1-1-1, 1-3-1-1, 1-3-4-1, 1-3-4-3, 1-4-1-1, or 1 short-1 long = Memory If a failure is detected at any point, the POST process will halt and produce a series of long and short beeps via the motherboard's PC speaker output to help indicate the root cause of the failure. The Power-On Self Test checks the primary hardware devices in your PC, including the CPU, memory, BIOS and any video cards. Your operating system will also communicate to your various hardware devices through the BIOS. It runs immediately after the POST (Power-On Self Test) and before the bootstrap (which locates your boot sector to continue booting the system), reading in these settings to understand what's inside your PC. The BIOS, or Basic Input Output System, is software that is used to define the important configuration aspects of your PC, including the current date and time, and the number and type of floppy and hard drives.
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