Dimension 8400 disk drives and interfaces.

Hello all

Machine is a Dimension 8400 running Win XP Pro with SP3.  So.....old hat stuff.  I've a few questions regarding disks and disk interfaces.

1. The machine is fitted with BIOS Version A03, dated 10/11/2004 - this is (I think) in the US format for dates.  Somewhere in the BIOS there is probably a very large number which controls the largest size of disk the machine can see and format.  As an example from another manufacturer, an HP Kayak Series 1 machine has this number set to 137 Gbyte in the BIOS.

So does anyone know:

(a) how big the number is for the 8400 (there is no clue in the official Dell Specifications) and

(b) at what address in the BIOS the number is located?

2. The machine has 4 SATA ports, labelled SATA 0 -3.  Does anyone know which of the SATA standards these ports conform to.  Possible answers are SATA 1 (1.5 Gbit/sec MTR maximum transfer rate), SATA 2 (3 Gbit/sec MTR) and SATA 3 (6Gbit/sec MTR).

From the dates the standards were published, I would guess that these ports are SATA 1 (or possibly SATA 2), but again the official Dell specifications give no information.

3. In an earlier period, when IDE/PATA drives were common, the cables from the motherboard to the disk had two connectors, and thus two disks could be connected.  One had to be jumpered as the master (or bootable) and the other was jumpered as a slave drive.  When the machine was booted, all the disk partitions found were assigned drive letters.  In a two disc set up with each disk having multiple partitions, the first partition on the master disk was assigned C:, then the first partition on the slave became D:.  Following this, all the remaining partitions on the master were assigned letters starting from E:......  Finally, all the partitions after D: on the slave were assigned drive letters starting after the last partition/drive letter on the master disk.  Got that?

So how is it with SATA?  Do the drives need to be jumpered?  How are the drive letters assigned during booting in a multi-disk set up with multiple partitions on each disk?

4. Now we come to the difficult bit.   Actually, I do not use IDE/PATA/SATA drives on this machine - in fact I have rarely used drives using this protocol since early 1981;  the current machine has an Adaptec SCSI adaptor and therefore has an SCSI disk.  You will thus see that I am relatively speaking an IDE virgin and know little about this technology and even less about SATA

The question is can I attach a SATA drive and use the machine in a mixed protocol configuration?  How are the drive letters assigned in a mixed protocol configuration?  How do you nominate the bootable disk - is this handled solely by the BIOS boot order or by some other method?

Trusting somebody in the community can help me out and thanks in advance for any help that can be given.

Kind regards

CoventryKid