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Hi Hale: Your consideration is well noted and accepted that instead of a compliance tool, we should rather report problems/issues and have them fixed via/in the spec. The reason to have a special tool is to tackle drives/devices which don't seem to follow the spec correctly. In last couple of years, we along with our OEM's have worked with 100's of different drives, of all sizes and brands, and have faced issues with some of them. We have been working with all drive vendors to bring these issues up and have them fixed apprpriately on drive F/W side or BIOS/App side. In some cases drive firmware simply didn't comply with the spec., in other cases, it was unclear if the drive behavior was correct or the application expectation was correct. So PARTIES-2 intends to address these questions and clarify known areas of confusion from existing spec and the tool verifies compliance of the a drive with the HPA extension (might be a new or an old drive with issues). This would give all concerned parties, drive vendors, OEMs, BIOS, application providers etc., a common benchmark to follow. If the issues is with the drive then drive F/W needs fixing else app/BIOS needs fixing. Cheers, Mukesh -----Original Message----- From: Hale Landis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 9:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [t13] Does volatile SET MAX "eliminate" HPA This message is from the T13 list server. On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 09:35:13 -0800, Mukesh Kataria wrote: >This message is from the T13 list server. >1. I do intend to propose the availability of an HPA complaince tool >that can be used by disk drive manufacturers, OEM's etc. to validate >the HPA compliance of a disk drive. Do we have a problem here? If so, lets fix the ATA/ATAPI-x description of this feature. We don't have industry wide "compliance tests" for ATA - why do we need one now? But I have a different list of issues with this HPA thing: I have received lots of questions from people and companies attempting to use the HPA to hide software for various legitimate purposes (asset tracking seems to be a big one). I posted questions here on about how the HPA can be used by these "third party" software companies (questions like if the HPA is changed by the addtion of some software product, does that void the computer's warrenty?") but I never received answers to these questions. I look forward to any new PARTIES document and/or additional comments from anyone about the use of the HPA. Hale *** Hale Landis *** www.ata-atapi.com ***
