In troubleshooting some issues with Fedora 11 I came across a link that was supposed to have the ATA specification for free (at last): www.t13.org It looks to me like you need to buy the ATA specification from ANSI, which isn't much help. Does anyone know where you can download the ATA specification for free? Where did the kernel developers get the ATA specificaiton?

The issue that I am troubleshooting is what different kernel modules affect the use of ATA harddrives, and what options they have. I was specifically looking at the newer 2.6.29 kernel and also the 2.6.30 kernel. An older kernel seemed to have no problem seeing the full size of the ATA harddrive, and I would like to find out why. Can post the kernel from the Gparted live cd later when I reboot and what modules it loads. I think that I used to know what option to use, but it has been some time since I had to use it that I need to do some troubleshooting to find it. The ATA specification would help in looking at some of the kernel modules, if someone knows where to get it for free.

If you need an official copy then you end up paying for the privilege.

You can log in to their ftp site eg
ftp://ftp.t13.org/
ftp://ftp.t13.org/ATA-ATAPI-7toINCITS/

with the public credentials from http://www.t13.org/FTPSite/Default.aspx

and you will find drafts of the ATAPI-7 standard here (which you would expect to be close to the final one).

Or you can google for things like:

• site:t13.org atapi draft filetype:pdf
• atapi-6 filetype:pdf
• t13 "at attachment" filetype:pdf

and you may turn up what you want. I won't provide links here because they will not be stable.