Source for 48-bit LBA Information









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HDINFO Tool Details

What is HDINFO?

HDINFO is a tool which provides information about ATA devices installed on your system. It can also help you if you are installing a 48-bit LBA compatible disk drive (greater than 137 GB) to your system. HDInfo detects hard drive information by communicating directly with the IDE controller and not through Windows. This enables you to know whether your hard drives are properly configured and basically functional indicating that any problems you are having with a hard drive are likely with Windows. HDINFO reports critical operating system information (version and service packs) which you need to know when installing a 48-bit LBA drive on your system. HDINFO includes the self booting operating system independent tool IDEINFO which which provides information about IDE hard drives installed on the system no matter what operating system is installed and also tests your system BIOS for 48-bit LBA support.

What's so special about IDEINFO?

When they created the 48-bit LBA enhancements to the ATA interface specification they did not define a mechanism to test the BIOS for 48-bit LBA support through system software which could be run on the latest operating systems such as Windows XP. To make matters worse, the design of the 48-bit LBA enhancements is such that the only way to truly test the BIOS for 48-bit LBA requires actually installing a 48-bit LBA hard drive to the system and doing the test through a DOS application. Unfortunately the latest operating systems such as Windows XP cannot run the type of DOS application necessary for a 48-bit LBA test. The IDEINFO tool solves this problem because it is self booting and operating system independent. Simply install the diskette in the diskette drive of your system, boot it, and it will report whether your system BIOS supports 48-bit LBA.


 
 

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HDINFO
Having trouble installing your 48-bit LBA Hard Drive?
48-bit LBA BIOS Test.