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study guides and tutorials. PC Architecture Basics |
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Drives When transfering data, copying data from one drive to another is the best method of data protection. A cluster is a group of sectors. Sectors are aligned in tracks. The seek time is the time that is takes the head to reach the needed track. The latency period is the time that it takes the sector to move under the head. The overall time it takes a hard drive to find data is the access time. The data transfer rate is how fast the hard drive sends data to the PC. The BIOS in older systems may not support large hard drives, and must be upgraded before installation. With these BIOSes, you can upgrade (flash or replace) the ROM Bios chip, replace the motherboard, buy an EIDE controller card, or use DDO (disk drive overlay) software to support larger hard drives. The BIOS limit for older controllers was 504 megabytes (sometimes listed as 528 MB because 504 megabytes is 528,482,304 bytes). The physical or low level format is rarely needed. To prepare a hard disk for use, setup a partition on the disk, format the partition, then load the OS. FDISK and PART (found on older versions of DOS) are the programs used for setting up partitions. Always back up hard drives before formatting.
FORMAT.COM - Program used for DOS formatting. FORMAT
/Q performs a quick format. Physical drives are actual separate drives while logical drives concern partitions on the physical drives. To write protect a 3.5 floppy, uncover the hole in the upper-right hand corner of the diskette. To write protect a 5.25 floppy, cover the notch on the side of the diskette. Computers detect HDD (high-density) 3.5 floppies by the hole in the upper left corner. FDD controllers use DMA channel 2 in most cases. HDI = Head to Disk Interference When replacing a power supply pay special attention to the physical characteristics, the voltage and connectors are standardized. Rom addresses, I/O addresses, IRQs, and DMA channels can all cause conflicts. IRQ conflicts are the most common conflict, because there are so few IRQs compared to the many peripherals that can be installed into a system. If a battery test fine after a boot configuration error, the most likely cause is the system board. Always carefully examine any shipped in merchandise before installation and powering the system on.
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Hardware
Topics: Basic PC Overview
Operating
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all your tech book needs: Please Read -DISCLAIMER: Technology changes very rapidly. The information presented here was believed to be accurate at the time it was gathered. No claim is made that this information is up to date, or that it represents the current technology used today. |
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