Ok, first FM, MFM, and RLL refer to the data encoding. Almost all drives today are RLL. IDE, ESDI, and SCSI are types of interfaces and the drives that run on them. The descriptions below will contain a lot of techno-babble to most, but the purpose of this is to give an idea how they work and in that capacity the text below should suffice. UPGRADING AND REPAIRING PC'S by Scott Mueller describes this much better as that is the purpose of his book, not this FAQ.

Open the computer and check the model number of the drive and contact the manufacturer is the only way to be 100% certain in many cases. That aside, the first thing to check is the number of pins on the drive's connector(s) and how many cables you have. The second thing to check is the CMOS setup, assuming, of course, that it is in a working system.

The PC is limited to two drive controllers total. SCSI, however, is a "host adapter" and not a drive controller. To the rest of your system, it appears more like an Ethernet card than a drive controller. For this reason, SCSI will always be able to coexist with any type drive controller. The main drawback here is that on most systems, you must boot off a disk on the primary drive controller, if you have one.

Again like the MCA versus ISA/EISA/VLB/PCI debate. There is what is better in theory and what is better in real life. ESDI is a dead standard with much faster and larger capacity, cheaper IDE drives out there, though it had the possibility of being the fastest. Unfortunately in the PS/2 arena you usually can't chose IDE which with the newer versions offers almost all of the speed of the best SCSI drives and still is the fastest single user, single task OS drive there is.

Yes, if the source disk is bootable on multiple machines, then it's DPSR drive is bootable on the same machines. Windows usually locks it's installation to the system it was originally installed on, so moving an installation to a different machine usually results in Windows not booting correctly. We believe this to be an excellent way to quickly and easily carry your "work" back and forth from the office to the home.

During the creation of A1, after 'gathering additional device files', I get the following error message: Using AIR-BAG diskettes to restore my system or restore to another system, the following error occurs after hitting return at the Boot: on the first diskette. When I create my AIR-BAG diskettes, the creation hangs when creating the A2 in the middle putting the files on the diskette.

No software of any sort can truly low-level format today's modern drives. The ability to low-level format hard drives was lost back in the early 1990's when disc surfaces began incorporating factory written "embedded servo data". If you have a very old drive that can truly be low-level reformatted, SpinRite v5.0 will do that for you (which all v6.0 owners are welcome to download and run anytime).

The primary difference is that SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) has a processor built into the drive which allows for faster read / writes. IDE drives rely on the CPU. SCSI may be beneficial to you if you are planning to run a database or other resource intensive application. An IDE drive is suitable for standard web serving. RAID Level 5 provides you with the redundancy necessary to recover from a single hard drive failure.

Note, however, that most IDE-RAID devices are not really hardware implementations. DBAN uses these devices as regular IDE controllers.

A#3.1: GNO/ME Overview Kernel Reference Manual Shell (gsh) User's Manual Manual Pages (some printed, all online) Online versions of these documents are also available. See Q#1.5.

There is a way to use ESDI drives with an SCSI interface (such as a PC with an SCSI card or a Sun workstation). It seems that Adaptec makes a translator which allows you to connect ESDI drives to SCSI controllers. I have an Emulex MD-21 which is the device you want. It is an ESDI to SCSI converter. It controls both 10 and 15 mbit/sec drives and provides a SCSI-1 interface on the other side. The interface will handle two ESDI drives as logical units 0 and 1.

Please spare us all the aggravation of the week long tirade that will result from asking this seemingly innocent question!

Currently Honeywall works on IDE drives only. You can configure IDE drive from Advanced Virtual Disk options in VMware. Future version of Honeywall CDROm should support SCSI. Normally, you get an allocation resource error when VMware is not able to properly communicate with the host devices. The error can be ignored, as it doesn't stop Honeywall from booting.

Yes. A client can use as many different services as it needs. To code such a client, simply include the header files for all the RPC interfaces used, and code each call the same way you would if using that interface in isolation.

Yes. A server can provide service on multiple interfaces simultaneously. A common example is a server that exports an application interface and a management interface. To code such an application, repeat the calls to rpc_server_register_if(), rpc_ep_register(), (and rpc_ns_binding_export() if you do that sort of thing in your server) for each interface, before calling rpc_server_listen().

The main issue is which device will be used for booting the system. Under MSDOS, The system BIOS determined this completely. A couple third party BIOSes (like MRBIOS) allowed the user to choose the boot source, but most conventional BIOSes just booted from the IDE if it was present. If no IDE was present then the standard option card BIOS scan would find the SCSI card's BIOS and use it to boot. Under Windows 95 and Windows NT, there are more options.

All sizes of EIDE compatible drives are supported, however only the first 137gb of each drive are addressable.

LOE IDE is a windows forms based application which give the user a rich UI where map viewing and content development can be done while offline. When online, it connects to the remote Open Earth server through a set of web services. The user can download the map content for a give area and upload locally done changes to the server when online. Also the user has the option of working online and edit and view the map content.

Yes, provided you are the only one using it. One copy of the IDE may either be used by a single person who uses the software personally on one or more computers, or installed on a single workstation used non-simultaneously by multiple people, but not both. You may access the IDE through a network, provided that you have obtained individual licenses for the software covering all workstations that will access the software through the network.

The main issue is which device will be used for booting the system. Under MSDOS, The system BIOS determined this completely. A couple third party BIOSes (like MRBIOS) allowed the user to choose the boot source, but most conventional BIOSes just booted from the IDE if it was present. If no IDE was present then the standard option card BIOS scan would find the SCSI card's BIOS and use it to boot. Under Windows 95 and Windows NT, there are more options.

Inexpensive due to high volume of production and simplified firmwar development and testing requirements. Very limited device attachment (two drives (including CDROMs) per channel, and two channels per system max.) (Recent versions of Linux (and I hear Win NT) support four or more ATA adapters) CPU is tied up transferring all data (actually newer EIDE controllers can do DMA as well if special drivers are loaded) All commands can overlap with commands on other devices.

In the Windows 2000 hierarchy of device recognition, IDE An acronym for either Intelligent Drive Electronics or Integrated Drive Electronics. An IDE interface is an interface for mass storage devices, in which the controller is integrated into the disk or CD-ROM drive. is located lower than SCSI. Therefore all third-party vendor IDE An acronym for either Intelligent Drive Electronics or Integrated Drive Electronics.

Well, it might have been impossible for me to put a simple MFM hard drive into my model 80 PS/2, 4M, model 8580-111, but I did get a NON-IBM ESDI drive installed, using a PS/2 ESDI controller, and the following patched version of LLFORMAT.COM, usually found on the 7080 reference disk.... First: a rumor that the following PS/2 80's LIKE MFM and ESDI: 041,071,111,311 and the following, which supposedly came with SCSI don't...121, 161, possibly AXX..

Older versions of the Red Hat RPMs for Ethereal put only the non-GUI components into the ethereal RPM, the fact that Ethereal is a GUI program nonwithstanding; newer versions make it a bit clearer by giving that RPM a name starting with ethereal-base.

A:) ActiveSynch 3.1 is the latest update to the PC-side component of Windows CE. The newest version allows for much easier NT 4 installing, Windows 2000 compatibility, doesn't hog the serial port at boot (lets you use a serial mouse with it), supports faster synching, much better conflict resolution for resolving problems, and a host of other bug fixes. You can get it from: http://www.microsoft.com/mobile/downloads/activesync.asp.

The TWGS-2B GAL was a DMA fix Applied Engineering issued for the board. It is an absolute requirement for Transwarp to work at all with at least some RamFAST SCSI boards (e.g. the revision C boards). With Applied Engineering long since out of business and the GAL virtually impossible to duplicate by convential means, that leaves no good source for replacement GALs.

ReactOS doesn't want to only create a "clone" of the NT system, but also aims at improving the kernel to be more resource efficient and stable (as you probably know, Windows systems are not very "sharp" in the manner that they use hardware). So giving you a deadline, a date for the completion of ReactOS is illusive. The best way to keep in touch with us is to visit our website frequently, so you'll know what's going on with the project.