What is in the Enhanced Disk Parameter Table?
In a standard BIOS, the Fixed Disk Parameter Table (FDPT) contains information about the geometry of the harddisk(s). It more or less contains the same information as the drive type entry in the CMOS setup. A program that wants to use the harddisk on a low level, bypassing DOS, normally uses the BIOS’ INT13 functions to achieve this. The Enhanced fixed Disk Parameter Table (EDPT) is an extension of the ordinary FDPT that makes use of undefined fields to provide information about the translation mode used. It uses a magic number (A0 in byte 3) and a checksum (in byte 15) to ensure that software cannot mistake random data for an EDPT. This is more or less standard across various flavors of translating BIOSes. On top of this, the Phoenix Enhanced BIOS standard specifies a number of extended INT13 functions and a 16 byte FDPT extension. The latter contains detailed information about the current PIO or DMA type, block mode used, LBA or (E)CHS addressing, 32 bit transfer mode, media type (re
