[Gllug] Compaq Compatability

[Chris Bell]

On Fri 04 Oct, Pavel Bradut Boghita wrote:
> 

> >
> >    I have started playing with an old Compaq which uses the first few
> >  sectors of the HDD as a sort of BIOS. 

   It is a Deskpro XE 450 (486DX2), the original HDD was tiny, so I loaded
Debian onto a larger disc, but looked up the information on the Compaq web
site when it failed to re-boot from the HDD.

> 
> 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)
> 
   Three similar Dell Optiplex Gs (P166) computers all sit with a blank
screen for about 2 minutes after switch on, then throw up an error message
about faulty HD controller and faulty HDD, press F1 to continue, F2 to enter
the BIOS. Pressing F1 or F2 at any time after switch on will cause the
computer to do whichever was selected once the error message has appeared,
and continue as normal. It does not seem to be an OS problem, one of them
still has 98. I have not had the same problem with other Dell computers.

-- 
Chris Bell


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