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Topic: Bios on HDD!!!

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Bányász

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Jan. 2006

Posted: Jan. 19 2006,12:20

Yesterday I installed DSL as frugal grub on an old pc (Compaq p233/64/3Gb).
This is a very long story and no happy ending...
No CD boot, Fdd broken, what to do, I used another machine to partition/format/install the HDD. It was cool! I had hardware issues, but when solved, the software worked as an OS should (damn you microsoft!). All was perfect, not exactly like in the help files, but smooth enough. At partitioning I discovered a small partition at the beginning of the HDD, a 8Mb partition named bios tools. I knew this means no good. OK, when all was settled, put back the HDD to the old computer. Poor bios began to cry, and now my machine does not start any more. Now dont think I got upset, but this is a challange I cannot resist. (got the computer from the attic...)
What I know: the motherboard is a wery cheap one, so they possybly saved money on the size of the bios memory too.. When the computer starts, before the memory test it calls the HDD and grub answers some error.
Normally it should from this point on test memory, than drives, etc. From the error point the boot is a long way, so I cannot bypass it using FDD.
Any idea?

skaos

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Posts: 430
Joined: April 2004

Posted: Jan. 19 2006,13:06

Did you delete that bios partition? If so, Compaq usually is quite good at supporting old boxes - you will probably find diskette based downloads to restore/recreate the bios partition on their home page. You could also check if there is any bios update that supports booting from the CD drive.

Bányász

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Posts: 10
Joined: Jan. 2006

Posted: Jan. 19 2006,13:17

Of course I did not delete. It is still there, only grub does not find it. I will check for updates, but on 4 computers I have no working FDD. Sounds stupid, but normally i dont need one. Better if someone would tell me what to do with grub to make things right. I am sure that would solve this.

andrewb

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Posts: 316
Joined: July 2005

Posted: Jan. 19 2006,22:27

I had one of these Compaqs quite a few years ago & did get RadHat up & running on it, alongside W95. I think the 'hidden' partition needs to be set as the boot partition. From memory all that is on it is a cut down version of W3.1 which runs the diagnostics (& setup if requested). You should be able to set the bootable partition on the drive using cfdisk/fdisk with the drive installed in another machine. The downloads were, as stated by an earlier post, available for download to recreate this partition. If you haven't deleted it & setting it to boot still doesn't work try changing the partition type to DOS using cfdisk/fdisk. Compaq used an unrecognisable partition identifier (code number) so other (M$) operating systems didn't see the partition (i.e. it doesn't even appear as an unformatted drive in windows) & that way no-one would change anything on it.

larkl

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Posts: 177
Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: Jan. 20 2006,13:19

I have to say that I HAVE deleted these diag partitions on Compaqs before. In my case, it still booted fine, but you lost access to the diagnostics (which could still be run from a floppy).

4 replies since Jan. 19 2006,12:20

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