Hopefully an easy BIOS question

Hi,

I have a K8N-E deluxe mobo.

My question is what does "32 bit data transfer" [Disabled | Enabled] actually mean.

I set all my disks (3 of them) to auto-detect but some of them are FAT16 soma are FAT32.

Should I leave the default of [Disabled] for all of them.

Could someone explain, the manual just states that this option enables or disables 32b-bit data transfer... Derrrrr

But I throught that FAT32 was 32 bit transfer, or am I barking up the wrong tree and mixing my software & hardware modes !

Any help understanding this would be great,

Ta, Mike.

is there a reason why you are keeping the FAT16? I've never herd of this before. I would just keep it enabled.

Hi,

There is no reason why they are FAT16, just a hang over when FAT was the only type , I even have a 4Gb disk in two paritions.

Anyway I guess I will find out soon, I am awaiting two new disks one for each machine I have, Each will become each machines new system disk (boot).

In one of them is the Asus mobo which I haven't seen in action yet , I have only seen the BIOS and C: prompt ,

This is the one that auto-detected the FAT16 disk when I tried to load the existing Win98 SE system on it, Win98SE failed badly hence the need for some new disks to reload windows.

The new disk will be formatted FAT32, sys'ed and hopefully a new OS installed.

The plan then is to mount the old system disk as data and copy stuff I need off of it.

I will see what the mobo makes of the newly formatted FAT32 disk, Again I assume it will enable the 32bit.

I am still confused, I don't like not knowing stuff

Sorry if the above is dribble I had a hard day, brain failing...

Mike.

That setting has no relationship to the FAT type. FAT16 just means 16bit values used to record location of files, etc on disk.

That setting will enable 32-bit (opposed to 16-bit) of data at a time. Enable it and if you experience problems (drive does not support) disable it. If drive supports should give slight performance boost.

Thanks Shakey for the info...

I will try this...

Enable it for my new large disks which will be FAT32, and disable it for my one FAT disk that I still have.

Funny thing was that on the last attempt to build this machine with the asus and I got to a DOS prompt on the old FAT disk, I did some copying of files...

After that I put the old mobo back in and scan disk detected errors on the files that I copied.. very odd.

Anyway here goes, I have set the enable/disable as above.

I will see what happenes...

Mike