Talk:ATA read/write sectors

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Various issues

Several things that annoy me about this page:

  • The code requires longmode
  • The code does not check for error messages
  • The code does not document the input properly - it can't be used as-is
  • The code does not document several magic numbers, and it's hardwired for a specific drive.
  • There already exists several ATA pages, including sample code. Why do we need a new one?

Merge with ATA? Discard the page altogether? Rewrite the code? - Combuster 09:14, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

It's much worse. Apparently, we have a whole bunch of ATA articles:

and reading/writing is covered in quite a few places, one way or another. There's a lot duplicated information so, except for the last article on the list, all of them should probably be merged. I doubt it'll be very easy though, it looks like a lot of work---I did the significantly easier job of merging two articles into Detecting Memory (x86) in the past and it still took me quite a while; maybe we should just delete all of them and start fresh (tounge in cheek).

The CPU operating mode-specific code is indeed another problem; C should be used instead. It's not the only article like this :( --Love4boobies 16:34, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Regarding the whole lot: the entire ATA set is a huge volume of text, and for overview it's probably a good reason to keep the pages a separate. That said, IDE is a disputed and shares a lot with the ATA PIO Mode page as well as having some information missing in the other. The problem is, both pages together have the full set of information, but IDE also has some stuff that's actually wrong. A merge has been proposed before on Talk:IDE, and there's a forum thread. Now it appears that we have to merge even more -_-
- Combuster 17:44, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
P.S. I pointed the ATA article to the category (instead of the broken page) and updated the indexing a bit in the fashion it was probably intended to be.

Deletion

Although I created that article. I vote for a deletion. Nicola

I vote for a merge in the long run, provided there is new information here. --Love4boobies 17:12, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

There is hardly any new information here, which brings me to the question: why did you create it? Apparently the existing content was not sufficient for any reason? - Combuster 17:44, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Just wanted to make it as a 'fastfood' example for those guys successfully entered long mode. - Nicola

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