Intel Desktop Board D845EPI Technical Product Specification
66
3.2 BIOS Flash Memory Organization
The Firmware Hub (FWH) includes a 4 Mbit (512 KB) symmetrical flash memory device.
Internally, the device is grouped into eight 64-KB blocks that are individually erasable, lockable,
and unlockable.
3.3 Resource Configuration
3.3.1 PCI Autoconfiguration
The BIOS can automatically configure PCI devices. PCI devices may be onboard or add-in cards.
Autoconfiguration lets a user insert or remove PCI cards without having to configure the system.
When a user turns on the system after adding a PCI card, the BIOS automatically configures
interrupts, the I/O space, and other system resources. Any interrupts set to Available in Setup are
considered to be available for use by the add-in card.
For information about the versions of PCI and Plug and Play supported by the BIOS, see
Section 1.5.
3.3.2 PCI IDE Support
If you select Auto in the BIOS Setup program, the BIOS automatically sets up the two
PCI IDE connectors with independent I/O channel support. The IDE interface supports hard drives
up to ATA-66/100 and recognizes any ATAPI compliant devices, including CD-ROM drives, tape
drives, and Ultra DMA drives (see Section 1.5 for the supported version of ATAPI). The BIOS
determines the capabilities of each drive and configures them to optimize capacity and
performance. To take advantage of the high capacities typically available today, hard drives are
automatically configured for Logical Block Addressing (LBA) and to PIO Mode 3 or 4, depending
on the capability of the drive. You can override the auto-configuration options by specifying
manual configuration in the BIOS Setup program.
To use ATA-66/100 features the following items are required:
• An ATA-66/100 peripheral device
• An ATA-66/100 compatible cable
• ATA-66/100 operating system device drivers
✏
NOTE
ATA-66/100 compatible cables are backward compatible with drives using slower IDE transfer
protocols. If an ATA-66/100 disk drive and a disk drive using any other IDE transfer protocol are
attached to the same cable, the maximum transfer rate between the drives is reduced to that of the
slowest device.
✏
NOTE
Do not connect an ATA device as a slave on the same IDE cable as an ATAPI master device. For
example, do not connect an ATA hard drive as a slave to an ATAPI CD-ROM drive.
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