[Gllug] Compaq Compatability

Pavel Bradut Boghita bradut at freeuk.com
Fri Oct 4 19:38:25 UTC 2002


On Friday 04 October 2002 7:39 pm, you wrote:
> On Fri 04 Oct, Richard Hall wrote:
> > I am thinking of buying some Compaq Evo Desktop D510 Space saver systems
> > for our new Phd. Students.   Some of these people will want to run linux
> > on them (hopefully all of them but I doubt it).    Has anyone had any
> > good or bad experiences with these systems under Linux or windows?
> >
> > Cheers
> > Rich
>
>    I have started playing with an old Compaq which uses the first few
>  sectors of the HDD as a sort of BIOS. 

I've installed Debian over the network on a non-compaq drive, formatted just 
to make sure and no errors were present (this was on the older Compaq Deskpro 
2000 - pentium 200mmx) On older Compaqs I've also noticed that the bios gets' 
confused about what drives it's got, reseting the cmos seems to resolve this.

> The computer throws up errors if they
> are not there, but will boot from a Linux floppy. There is a file on the
> Compaq website which can be copied to floppy and will write a basic
> (obsolete) version to a new HDD, and another file which will update it.
> There seemed to be other facilities available for different Compaq models.
>    I think that some Dell computers may use a similar system.

I cannot say anything about the newer Dells, but my Dimension XPS R400 has 
been extremely good with all the *nixes I've thrown at it and right now 
rather likes Debian (the system doesn't use anything on the harddrive as 
complement to bios)

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