3.9 Booting the System for the First Time
3.9.6 Integrated peripherals and fixed disk detection screens
Integrated Peripherals – The features found in this section of the BIOS setup are used to configure the control of integrated peripheral support on the motherboard. Integrated peripherals typically include such devices as the onboard floppy and hard drive controllers, USB controller, serial ports, parallel ports, and the sound card chip (see the Integrated Peripherals Configuration screen example in the figure). Setting these features to Auto, when applicable, permits the BIOS to issue, for example, the appropriate IDE drive commands to determine what mode the hard drives will support. This is always a recommended option. The USB Controller feature is simply for enabling or disabling the controller chip for the USB ports on the motherboard.

Fixed disk detection – From the Standard CMOS Setup screen discussed earlier, there is a "Hard Disks" feature, which had an AUTO setting for automatically detecting the hard drive geometry (number of heads, cylinders, sectors, and so on). There are times when this feature will not work with certain IDE hard drives. IDE HDD Auto Detection is for such situations. It allows the manual running of the IDE auto detection program and selects the auto detection for each drive on the controller channel. The BIOS will scan and report drive parameters which can then be accepted or rejected. Any drive parameters that are accepted are then entered into the Standard CMOS Setup.

As usual, the "Reset Configuration Data" feature is an escape mode for resetting this section to defaults and returning to the last known good configuration during reboot. Instructions for configuring each feature are included in the manual that comes with the motherboard.