[ The PC Guide | Systems and Components Reference Guide | Motherboard and System Devices | System BIOS | BIOS Settings | IDE Device Setup / Autodetection ]

Write Precompensation

This is a relic from the mid-80s. Older disks that use the same number of sectors for every track sometimes required an adjustment to be made while writing, beginning at a certain track number, and this setting was that value. See here for a better description of write precompensation.

Modern IDE/ATA and SCSI drives have built-in intelligent controllers that take care of these sorts of adjustments (and many more) automatically. This setting should normally be set to -1, 0 or 65535 (the largest value it can support) or whatever value the autodetection sets. Which of these "bogus" values your BIOS uses to mean "there is no write precompensation value for this drive" depends on the BIOS. The number itself is ignored by the drive in any event.

Note: IDE autodetection will set this value automatically.

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