On Tue, Oct 19, 1999 at 12:34:55AM +0200, Johan Ihren wrote:
> This is an OLD machine (I just checked and the BIOS is called
> PhoenixBIOS v1.03 and is from 1992). So the machine is perhaps not
> pre-historic, but at least somewhat medieval. It has never heard of
> APM, does no spinning down of disks, and by no stretch of my
> imagination can I believe the IDE controller doing fancy things ;-)

These old machines are the one who had enhanced IDE controllers (such
as these ISA controllers with cache). Newest machines have more standardised
things.
These controllers catch ATA commands and interpret them by themselve
(for data caching, read-ahead, etc ...), and usually just punt on those they
don't know (it's impossible to get an ATAPI device working with these, for
example). They ususally implement the command set used by windows but nothing
more :(


--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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