The following statement is a copy of the information that the 
Intel Corporation has provided Gateway 2000 on the PC-TECH RZ1000 
PCI EIDE controller issue.  This information was originally 
posted on Intel's web site at 
http://www.intel.com/procs/support/rz1000/.  Additional 
information and updates will be posted at this address as they 
become available.  Any questions or concerns that you may have 
about this issue should be directed to Gateway 2000's tech 
support personnel.  

This issue is operating system and motherboard dependent.  
Gateway 2000 motherboards that could possibly be affected would 
include: the Intel Batman, the Intel Batman's Revenge, the Intel 
Plato, the Anigma Saturn, and the Anigma Saturn II.  There is a  
DOS detection utility (RZTEST.EXE) that can be used to determine 
if your computer is using the PC-TECH RZ1000 controller.  This 
utility has not yet been made available by the Intel Corporation.  
Once this utility is made available, which should be sometime 
during the evening of Aug. 17th., it will be posted on the 
Gateway 2000 BBS, on Intel's web site at 
http://www.intel.com/procs/support/rz1000/rztest.exe, and on 
CompuServe.  A comprehensive list of affected and unaffected 
operating system can be found in the document below. 

Please note that the operating system patches that are listed in 
this document have not been tested by Gateway 2000. 


Updated information Rev 1.8

 We have largely completed our 
investigation of various operating systems to determine if they 
were affected by this problem.  We have found no new OSs that are 
affected. 

IBM has completed work on the OS/ 2 patch and it is now 
available. 

We have developed a diagnostic utility which detects the presence 
of the RZ1000 chip.  Further details are available in this 
message or at http://www.intel.com/procs/support/rz1000/ 


There have been reports, on several usenet newsgroups of a 
problem with the PCI computers that use the RZ1000 IDE 
controller.  Motherboards that use this chip include Intel 
motherboards commonly known as PremiŠre or Plato, as well as non-
Intel motherboards.  The latest Intel motherboards which use the 
Triton chipset do not use the RZ1000 chip and do not have this 
problem. 

This problem presents the potential for data corruption which 
could manifest itself as a misspelled word in a document, 
incorrect values or account balances in accounting software, 
unexplained GP faults when program execution reaches a corrupted 
instruction in the executable code, destruction of directory 
trees, or even corruption of an entire partition or drive. 

Most users of early PCI motherboard-based systems are unaffected 
by this problem because it is also dependent on the Operating 
System (OS), BIOS, and the IDE hard disk driver and certain 
operations (e.g. simultaneous floppy and IDE hard drive 
accesses.) 

Operating systems which are unaffected by this problem when run 
on Intel motherboards include: 

WIN 95
WIN NT ver 3.5 and later
Win 2.x
DOS
WIN 3.x is unaffected when using 16-bit disk accesses.
WIN 3.x is unaffected when using any of the major 32-bit IDE Disk 
Drivers (Microsoft, Western Digital,OnTrack, MicoHouse) 
Netware 
Unixware 1.1
NEXTSTEP
Banyan
Solaris 2.4+ 
SCO Unix 3.1+ 

Affected Operating systems included:

OS/2 and WARP
WIN NT 3.1 and earlier versions
LINUX

Operating systems affected by this problem can be worked around 
by updating the IDE hard disk device driver.  In the case on WIN 
NT 3.1 a patch is available from Microsoft via the world wide web 
at:  http://www.microsoft.com/KB/softlib.  The patch is called 
"PCIADSK.EXE". 

IBM has completed its work on an updated OS/2 driver.  This patch 
is called APAR PJ19409 and is available via a number of IBM on-
line services, including http://www.ibm.com. 

Intel is committed to ensuring that users of our products are 
satisfied.  We have therefore taken the following steps to 
address the concerns we have seen on the various usenet groups. 

Fully characterize the problem.
Frequently update the user community on our progress.
Work with OS vendors to develop and distribute patches, as 
required. Develop a utility program to identify which systems are 
susceptible to this problem. 

The DOS detection utility program is now available and can 
download at http://www.intel.com/procs/support/rz1000/rztest.exe 
and on the CompuServe forums.  This detection program will verify 
the presence of RZ1000 chips.