ide identify command is an u201c attention application programming interface u201d atapi device identify instruction the ide identify instruction i e the atapi device id instruction is transmitted to the cd rom drive via the cd rom drive interface if an ide cd rom drive is installed in the computer system in response and if an ide cd rom drive is installed the cd rom drive returns a sequence of ide identification data bytes this sequence of data bytes includes the ide identification string hereinafter the u201c id string u201d that includes a vendor identification number and model number for the cd rom drive at 104 the ide identification data is input and the id string is obtained from the data it is desirable that the process 100 wait a few seconds to allow the cd rom drive if installed to respond to the ide identify command the ide identification data will be located at a predetermined memory location of the computer system and thus the data and id string can be easily obtained it is desired that the predetermined memory location be initialized to values that do not correspond to any valid ide type id string this way if there is no response to the ide identify command the ide identification.