Ampro Corporation 486E Date and Time, Floppy Drives, IDE Hard Disk Drives, Drive Parameter Setup

Product Reference

Date and Time

The time shown on the first SETUP screen is continuously updated and reflects the current state of the hardware real-time clock. The new time and date entered is immediately written to the device. Enter the date in the form mm/dd/yyyy. The year requires all 4 digits. Enter the time in 24-hour format, in the form hh:mm:ss.

The ROM BIOS maintains the system real-time clock. It is incremented approximately 18.2 times per second by an interrupt from timer/counter 0. The ROM BIOS automatically initializes the system real-time clock from the hardware real-time clock upon system reset or power up. The accuracy of the hardware real-time clock depends on connecting a battery to the appropriate terminals on J5, the Utility connector. If a battery is not attached, the system time information does not remain accurate after a power cycle.

Floppy Drives

The ROM BIOS supports all of the popular DOS-compatible floppy disk formats. This includes all the 5-1/4 inch and 3-1/2 inch floppy formats—360K, 720K, 1.2M, and 1.44M byte. The ROM BIOS also supports dual-capacity use of high density floppy drives, systems can be read and booted from 360K floppies in a 1.2M 5-1/4 inch drive, and from 720K floppies in a 1.44M 3-1/2 inch drive.

Drive Parameter Setup

Enter the number and type of floppy drives in the system. If the drives connected to the system do not match the parameters in the configuration memory, POST displays an error message. To eliminate the error message, set the drive parameters to match your floppy drives.

IDE Hard Disk Drives

The ROM BIOS supports one or two hard disk drives connected to the IDE interface. The IDE SETUP parameters are used for setting the physical parameters of the drives you install in your system. Physical drives can have one or more logical partitions. Up to eight logical drives or drive partitions can be installed but only two physical drives can be used. Older versions of DOS may limit the number of logical drives that can be installed.

No parameters are displayed for Auto detect hard disk. All IDE/ATA drives should be configured for Auto. Manual entries are for legacy use only to support Western Digital and similar MFM AT bus controllers.

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