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T13/2132-D Revision 3 June 23, 2010
6 Working Draft Enhanced Disk Drive - 4 (EDD-4)
3.2 Symbols and abbreviations
3.3 Conventions
3.3.1 Overview
Lowercase is used for words having the normal English language meaning. Certain words and terms used in this
standard have a specific meaning beyond the normal English language meaning. These words and terms are
defined either in clause 3 or in the text where they first appear.
The names of abbreviations, commands, fields, and acronyms used as signal names are in all uppercase (e.g.,
IDENTIFY DEVICE). Fields containing only one bit are usually referred to as the “name” bit instead of the
“name” field. (See 3.3.6 for the naming convention used for naming bits.)
3.1.22 Logical Address/Geometry: A logical address or geometry is used to address a device by an
application, such as DOS, using the INT 13h interface. INT 13h FN 8 returns the logical
geometry of the device.
3.1.23 Master Boot Record (MBR): The first LBA on a disk.
3.1.24 MBR disk layout: The disk layout traditionally used by BIOS based systems.
3.1.25 NV Memory: Non-Volatile memory is memory that retains content even when the power has
been removed. The most common type of NV memory on a computer system is the CMOS
RAM that is used to store system configuration information.
3.1.26 OS: An Operating System is a software abstraction layer that provides services that give
applications access to system hardware, in a hardware independent fashion. Examples of these
services include memory management, multi-threaded task management, file system
management, printer management, and screen management.
3.1.27 PATA (Parallel ATA) device: A device implementing the parallel ATA transport (see ATA8-APT).
3.1.28 POST: The Power-On Self-Test is the part of the BIOS that takes control immediately after power
is applied to the computer. POST initializes the computer hardware so that an OS may be
loaded.
3.1.29 QWord: A sequence of eight contiguous bytes considered as a unit. See 3.3.10.
3.1.30 QWord-aligned pointer: A pointer where the lowest order three bits are 000b.
3.1.31 SATA (Serial ATA) device: A device implementing the serial ATA transport (see ATA8-AST).
3.1.32 seg:offset: An addressing method where the address is calculated by the following formula:
seg*16+offset. This calculation results in a 20 bit linear address space.
3.1.33 Standard Floppy Drive: The Standard Floppy Drive is the generic term to define the currently
used 5.25 inch floppy drives and the 3.5 inch floppy diskette drives found in many systems.
3.1.34 Volume Boot Record (VBR): The first LBA in a bootable partition.
3.1.35 word: A sequence of two contiguous bytes considered as a unit. See 3.3.10.
Abbreviation Meaning
* multiplied by
/ divided by
< less than
> greater than
GPT GUID Partition Table (see UEFI-2.3)
MBR Master Boot Record (see 3.1.24)
OS Operating System (see 3.1.26)
UEFI Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (see UEFI-2.3)
VBR Volume Boot Record (see 3.1.34)