Hi; I am trying to figure out how BIOS first gets the address and specifications (whatever they may be exactly) on a new machine? Suppose I have just assembled the hardware for a new machine and am going to fire it up for the first time, do I need a special program for BIOS to find the hardware it needs to find? For example, the clock, IDE and SCSI harddrives, floppies, keyboard etc. Are the locations stored in BIOS ROM or does BIOS get new addresses etc. every time my machine starts up? I can find lots of sites that describe the operation of BIOS, but none that shows how, in binary form, information is presented in ROM or RAM to boot loaders (GRUB) etc. I have looked pretty thoroughly at the steps involved with using the machines BIOS, and how the boot loader gets its data from BIOS, but I can't find anything that deals with how BIOS gets specific data and how it is passed to GRUB. The UEFI and EFI protocols seem to be the controlling/standardized form but I can't find how the one or the other come into play. I think hints or sites would be sufficient to trace down the full answer. -- Regards Bill