Acronis os selector 8.0 User Manual

7.8

Getting Detailed Information about a Hard Disk

With help of Disk Administrator you can get all the information about a hard
disk that is available from BIOS. This requires the following steps:

1. Choose the hard disk (if there are several of them).
2. Choose the Hard disk properties function (from the Disk menu, the

toolbar or with the Alt+P hotkey).

3. Press Enter or Esc or click the OK button in the lower part of the dialog

box to return to the main window after viewing the disk properties.

The Properties dialog box has several sheets. You can switch between these
sheets either using the mouse by clicking the desired tab or with the
keyboard by pressing Alt and the highlighted key from the tab title.

7.8.1

Standard Property Sheet

This sheet is always there and contains the information that is directly used
by Acronis OS Selector:

• BIOS number is a hexadecimal number, which is used by BIOS functions

to enumerate disks. Hard disks enumeration starts with 80h. Numbers
less than 80h are usually used for floppy disk drives.

• Sectors per Track, Heads, Cylinders describe the geometry of a hard disk.

The geometry is used to correctly invoke usual disk access functions
(interrupt 13h, functions 0–8), since the latter require indication of sector
number on the track, head number, and cylinder number. Maximum
values that can be passed to usual disk access functions are as follows:
•  sector number – 63;
•  head number – 255;
•  cylinder number – 1023.