BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive Services

Overview

To support addressing of even larger disks, an interface known as INT 13h Extensions was introduced by IBM and Microsoft, then later re-published and slightly extended by Phoenix Technologies as part of BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive Services (EDD). It defines new functions within the INT 13h service, all having function numbers greater than 40h, that use 64-bit logical block addressing (LBA), which allows addressing up to 8 ZiB. (An ATA drive can also support 28-bit or 48-bit LBA which allows up to 128 GiB or 128 PiB respectively, assuming a 512-byte sector/block size). This is a "packet" interface, because it uses a pointer to a packet of information rather than the register based calling convention of the original INT 13h interface. This packet is a very simple data structure that contains an interface version, data size, and LBAs. For software backward-compatibility, the extended functions are implemented alongside the original CHS functions, and calls to functions from both sets can be intermixed, even for the same drive, with the caveat that the CHS functions cannot reach past the first 8064 MB of the disk.