User Manual

MiniStation All-in-One Petit Board User’s Manual

Award BIOS Setup

 LBA (Logical Block Addressing) mode

A new HDD accessing method to overcome the 528MB bottleneck. The number of cylinders, heads &

sectors shown in setup may not be the number physically contained in the HDD.

During HDD accessing, the IDE controller will transform the logical address described by sector, head

& cylinder number into its own physical address inside the HDD.

The maximum HDD size supported by LBA mode is 8.4GB which is obtained by the following formula:

no. Cylinder ( 1024)

x no. Head ( 255)

x no. Sector ( 63)

x bytes per sector ( 512)

814 Gigabytes

 LARGE mode

Extended HDD access mode supported by Award Software.

Some IDE HDDs contain more than 1024 cylinder without LBA support (in some cases, user does not

want LBA). The Award BIOS provides another alternative to support these kinds of HDD!

Example of LARGE mode:

CYLS HEADS SECTOR MODE

1120 16 59 NORMAL

560 32 59 LARGE

BIOS tricks DOS (or other OS) that the number of cylinders is less than 1024 by dividing it by 2. At

the same time, the number of heads is multiplied by 2. A reverse transformation process will be made

inside INT13h in order to access the right HDD address!

Maximum HDD size:

no. Cylinder ( 1024)

x no. Head ( 32)

x no. Sector ( 63)

x bytes per sector ( 512)

1 Gigabytes

3. Remarks

To support LBA or LARGE mode of HDDs, there must be some software involved. All these software are

located in the Award HDD Service Routine (INT 13h). It may fail to access a HDD with LBA (LARGE) mode

selected if you are running under a Operating System that replaces the whole INT 13h.