PCA Forums

Friend has a Compaq with a 433 Celly in it. The nasty Bigfoot hard drive that it came with bit the big one, of course no backup. I swapped in a new Maxtor, but the damn proprietary bios is killing me! Want to use the restore disk to set it up, DOS works fine, how in hell do I get this thing to work?
Tried to uprade the bios with a rompaq, but when I run the .exe program on my personal box, it gives me a "can't format" the floppy to set up the disk to use in the Compaq. Tried everything, Compaq website had something about something has to be installed on the hard drive for the bios to recognize it. Hope all proprietary box builders burn in hell for all time!

Anyone?

thanks,
sethpa

Yeah, you're pretty much screwed. OEMs got pretty good a few years back about locking down the repair disks so they would only work on the system that they shipped with. Same goes with the BIOS. You might be able to do a clean install using a CD other than the repair CD (e.g. your own win98 cd), but I wouldn't hold your breath about getting around the HDD issue.

Tried a Win98 repair disk, got the new OS installed, but on first reboot, nothing works anymore The bios shows me little to nothing. So, I guess it's gotta go to the mysterious Compaq repair facility?

thanks for the reply TS, that made me feel better

sethpa

Compaq use to put the bios stuff on the hard drive. Is the original drive still good and can you ghost it ? (restore the ghost image to the new drive, then use the restore cd.)

we had some older compaq p-150s or something in the office we had to clean up before they were sold/given away - i remember something about going into an odd bios setup before going into the regular bios when we fooling around with the hard drives - i remember we would power up and just hit function and similar until we found the one that worked, once we got through that screen, we were ok - i don't remember what the key was or the sequence exactly -

it's odd that they don't have something on the website because hds have to fail on those puppies

I had an older Compaq laptop last year. I ran fdisk and put the 10gig hard drive as one drive rather than two partitions. After that the restore CD no longer worked. Fortunately, I had a ghost image of the two partitions.

that's the problem, the original HD is toast. Have tried all one partition, 2 partitions, and no matter what, can't get the restore CD to do it's thing. Everything is fine working in DOS with a boot floppy. Can use the hard drive, but when installing the OS, comes to screaching halt on first boot. Can't get it to come back up again. There's a sequence to getting the restore to work, have to put caps lock and num lock on with restore cd in. Then after Cd starts, you turn off one of them. But I never got it to work.

The bios gives little to no info about anything. Where's the Flyin' Penguin when you need him?

thanks again guys,
sethpa

I was in the same boat with my neighbors compaq...you need to call up compaq with your model/serial and request an hdd setup boot cd.

that cd will boot and automatically set up 2 partitions....then you use the restore cd...

the downside....

It took them a month to send the cd out....

my neighbor just took his comp back to sears and demanded a swap...

I remember reading that the Compaq hard drives had identification numbers on them to allow the restore CD to know what type of Compaq was being restored. Compaq also published a list of those numbers on their website so if you had to install a new hard drive, the restore disk would still work. I haven't looked at the Compaq support forums for years so I don't know if that information is still available.