Tom Peters wrote:
At 05:03 PM 6/13/2006 -0500, you wrote:
Hello All. I've recently acquired a Compaq
Portable III (286, cool
gas plasma display) and am having some problems with the hard drive.
After powering up, the system says to insert a diagnostic disk in
drive A. If I choose "Resume" by hitting the F1 key, it will boot
PC-DOS just fine from the floppy drive (1.2 MB, 5.25") although it
complains about the time and date not being set. The system doesn't
show a C drive, however, and FDISK also says there is no hard disk.
Here is my question - do I need these diagnostic disks to setup the
hard drive on this system? Or is the hard disk just dead? Does
anyone have a copy of the disks? Thanks for any help. John Reeve
Usually, there is no onboard bios setup code-- you had to have the
blasted diag disk. The big mistake many people make is using a
non-Compaq hard disk tool to partition the hard disk. Compaq creates a
small dedicated partition on the hard disk and stores the setup disk
there, and sometimes the diagnostic.
Really? I know that some vendors (e.g., HP) do that on NEW
machines but didn't think that was the case "way back when".
I.e. my 386/25 deskpro wasn;t like that. I thought all of
them relied on a "setup floppy". I know I had such floppies
for the deskpro and my portable 3...
If the setup code is present, you can access it by
watching the screen
after the POST. At one point, the cursor will jump to the upper right
corner of the screen, and sit there for about 2 seconds. If you hit the
magic key when the cursor is sitting there, you should get the
setup/diagnostics menu, if the Compaq Diagnostic partition is still
present.