A+ practice and study guide questions

ok people. I just want some clearification. I ran across a question that was asked two different ways. (study quides and practice tests). To determine the position of a hard drive. the answer was that this can be determined by the postition on the cable and to determine the drive letter is done by the operating system! is this correct?

Question 2: I just stumbled across this one on a study guide. What are the useable DMA channels. The answer on the study guide are
a) 0, (b) 1, (c) 7, (d) 8, (e) 9 and the answer on the study guide was a, b, and c. I thought that 2 and 4 were were the only channels used?

thx

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itwannabe

cap2361
Question 2: I just stumbled across this one on a study guide. What are the useable DMA channels. The answer on the study guide are
a) 0, (b) 1, (c) 7, (d) 8, (e) 9 and the answer on the study guide was a, b, and c. I thought that 2 and 4 were were the only channels used?

I believe that 0 1 7 are correct...2 = Floppy disk controller, and
4 = First DMA Controller Cascade (not usable)

anyone else?

RussS

DMA Channels

0 8- or 16-bits
1 8- or 16-bits Parallel Port (for ECP or EPP)
2 8- or 16-bits Floppy Drive
3 8- or 16-bits Parallel Port (for ECP or EPP)/Audio
4 Reserved
5 16-bits Open
6 16-bits Open
7 16-bits Open

bellboy

cap2361 wrote:

the position of a hard drive

by this do you mean "drive letter"?

okay, can somebody correct me if i am wrong, the drive letters are normally assigned as follows:

a:\ and b:\ are reserved for floppy drives and c:\ will be the first logical drive on the ide primary master. if there is only one hard drive in the system with a single partition, the cd or dvd rom will be given the drive letter d:\

on a computer with one hard drive, partitioned with logical drives, the active partition will be drive c:\ and the logical drives within the extended partition will be drives d:\ etc until finished and then the next available letter will be assigned to the cd or dvd rom.

i cannot, for the life of me, remember letter assignment when there are more than one hard drives in a system. if i remember, i must creat such a scenario in my lab soon.

the drive letters are not assigned by the operating system.

cap2361

thanks bellboy. I just wanted to know that it wasn't the operating system. I was taught that it was the cable positioning.

Webmaster

By default the cable position matters. But drive letters can be assigned using Disk Manager in Win NT, 2000 and XP. I hope I'm not confusing things here.

lazyart

I'm all confused about drive assignments-- many BIOSes have a setting for boot device. Some use HDD0, HDD1 etc, some use C,D,E...

On top of that you can change drive letter assignments in the OS, leading you to believe either BIOS or OS is responsible.

I had something along these lines on my core exam, and surprise! the only question(s) i missed were in that domain.

cap2361

thx web master for the extra info. I haven't stumbled on that info about the disk manager. It is on my list to look up. and thx to all others for clarification. I will just have to watch the wording on the exam. I image similar questions on both examines. one could pertain to core and the other to OS.

Drakonblayde

Drive letter assignments can get confusing... I'm actually not sure how it works if you have three or four drives in the system (ie, would the partitions of the master drive on the 2nd ide channel get higher priority than the partitions of the slave drive on the 1st ide channel), but when you have two drives in the system, letters are assigned like this:

Active Primary partition on the 1st hard drive in the system
Active Primary partition on the 2nd hard drive in the system
Logical drives in the extended partition of the 1st hard drive on the system
Logical drives in the extended partition of the 2nd hard drive in the system

So if I had my 1st disk split into a primary partition and an extended partition with one logical drive, and the same setup on the 2nd hard drive, the letter assignments would look like this:

Drive # Partition # Drive Letter
===== ======= ========
1 1 (Primary) C:
1 2 (Ext. Logical) E:
2 1 (Primary)

2 2 (Ext. Logical) F:

Any CD/DVD drives would take up the next available letters.

Edit: Bah, the post messed up the formatting of the above, hopefully it makes sense.

If you have Cable Select enabled, then 1st and 2nd drive are determined by their position on the cable. If you jumper the drives by Master/Slave than their position on the cable no longer matters.

And then of course, the newer OS's can override these and allow you to change the drive letters, but this is how the letters are assigned if you're dealing with pre NT style Microsoft OS's