Patent ID: 7822937

Claim:
A method of passing commands between a BIOS and a disk drive's firmware to allocate resources in the disk drive, said disk drive having a user accessible area, a reserve area in which information stored is not accessible by a user, and a boundary between the user accessible area and the reserve area, said commands upon being executed performing steps comprising: reading a capacity of the disk drive accessible to the user; retrieving drive parameters from the reserve area; making commands based on the drive parameters available at the disk drive's firmware; resetting the boundary between the user accessible area and the reserve area so as to increase the reserve area; and inputting information to the increased reserve area, the inputted information including restoration information to restore to a factory setting, wherein the disk drive is configured as part of a device selected from a group consisting of a cell phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a digital camera, an MP3 player, a CD player, a DVD player, a personal video recorder (PVR) and a gaming device; and wherein the reserve area are split into three subareas, consisting of a first subarea suitable for access by a disk drive manufacturer, a second subarea suitable for access by a computer manufacturer, and a third subarea suitable for use as a generic area, wherein the reserve area is suitable for being accessed by at least one of a hot key utilized to access the reserved area and a BIOS password utilized so that only system BIOS access is allowed; wherein said hotkey invokes an OS driver associated with an OS, said OS driver being configured to communicate with the BIOS so that the OS is unaware of the reserved area.