Talk:ATA read/write sectors

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:

• IDE
• ATAPI
• ATA read/write sectors
• ATA PIO Mode
• ATA/ATAPI using DMA
• ATA/ATAPI Power Management
• ATA in x86 RealMode (BIOS)

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)

Deletion

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