The Stratum Technology Support Centre is open for telephone support calls 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday to Friday. The following files are available as freeware for download by customers & interested parties.
Early notebook and desktop computers are unable to recognise larger disk drives that are not on their built-in drive table. Some computers have a user definable drive type setting (usually type 47) for manually configuring drive parameters otherwise a drive overlay is required to override the current CMOS parameters. Stratum Technology use the excellent SoftBIOS utility from Broomsleigh Computer because it is fast and doesn't conflict with existing software. Some computers are unable to make use of disk drives larger than 528Mb but SoftBIOS Plus automatically switches the disk drive into extended IDE mode at boot time and is therefore able to support disk drives up to a capacity of 8.4Gb. SoftBIOS is automatically included free with a Stratum disk upgrade whenever it is required. SoftBIOS is very resilient and cannot be destroyed by partitioning or formatting your disk drive with the FDISK or FORMAT routines, however if you upgrade to a later version of DOS or Windows using Microsoft's SETUP.EXE, sometimes the Boot sector is automatically overwritten without warning. If the SoftBIOS logo does not appear when you boot from your hard disk then recovery is simple using the SoftBIOS Key Disk supplied with your disk upgrade. Boot from any bootable floppy disk and when you are at the A: prompt place the Universal Key Disk in the floppy drive, type SBFIXMBR and follow the on screen instructions. If the Universal Key Disk has been lost then Download the file KEYDISK.ZIP, copy the file to an empty directory and unzip the contents to an empty formatted floppy disk. At the A: prompt, type SBFIXMBR and follow the on screen instructions or call Stratum for support. KEYDISK.ZIP This simple utility can be used to determine the drive type, serial number and parameters of your IDE Hard Disk Drive. It bypasses the system BIOS and communicates directly with the hard disk so it will work even if the CMOS has been set to 'No Drive'. This utility will hang if no IDE drive is present or if the drive is Busy due to an error condition. IDAT.EXE |