Should you have a system w/ an AWARD Bios and your drives are larger than 32GB and it will not boot, one is required to perform a few OEM operations first. The option is called "STROKE" because it allows one to "soft clip" the drive to work around a barrier limit. For Maxtor drives it is called "jumpon.exe". Please search Maxtor's web-site for "JUMPON.EXE". IBM has a similar tool at: <http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm>.
If you have a CD-ROM drive using the ATAPI protocol, say Y. ATAPI is a newer protocol used by IDE CD-ROM and TAPE drives, similar to the SCSI protocol. Most new CD-ROM drives use ATAPI, including the NEC-260, Mitsumi FX400, Sony 55E, and just about all non-SCSI double(2X) or better speed drives.
If you say Y here, the CD-ROM drive will be identified at boot time along with other IDE devices, as "hdb" or "hdc", or something similar (check the boot messages with dmesg). If this is your only CD-ROM drive, you can say N to all other CD-ROM options, but be sure to say Y or M to "ISO 9660 CD-ROM file system support".
Note that older versions of LILO (LInux LOader) cannot properly deal with IDE/ATAPI CD-ROMs, so install LILO 16 or higher, available from <ftp://brun.dyndns.org/pub/linux/lilo/>.
If you want to compile the driver as a module ( = code which can be inserted in and removed from the running kernel whenever you want), say M here and read Documentation/modules.txt. The module will be called ide-cd.o.
This will provide SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices, and will allow you to use a SCSI device driver instead of a native ATAPI driver.
This is useful if you have an ATAPI device for which no native driver has been written (for example, an ATAPI PD-CD or CDR drive); you can then use this emulation together with an appropriate SCSI device driver. In order to do this, say Y here and to "SCSI support" and "SCSI generic support", below. You must then provide the kernel command line "hdx=scsi" (try "man bootparam" or see the documentation of your boot loader (lilo or loadlin) about how to pass options to the kernel at boot time) for devices if you want the native EIDE sub-drivers to skip over the native support, so that this SCSI emulation can be used instead. This is required for use of CD-RW's.
Note that this option does NOT allow you to attach SCSI devices to a box that doesn't have a SCSI host adapter installed.
If both this SCSI emulation and native ATAPI support are compiled into the kernel, the native support will be used.
This driver is also available as a module ( = code which can be inserted in and removed from the running kernel whenever you want). If you want to compile it as a module, say M here and read Documentation/modules.txt. The module will be called ide-scsi.o
This driver adds PIO mode setting and tuning for all PIIX IDE controllers by Intel. Since the BIOS can sometimes improperly tune PIO 0-4 mode settings, this allows dynamic tuning of the chipset via the standard end-user tool 'hdparm'. Please read the comments at the top of drivers/ide/pci/piix.c. If unsure, say N.