20 Oct
2004
20 Oct
'04
10:52 p.m.
I found the SET320P.EXE program on the COMPAQ site, and it allows
several items 'normally' found in a BIOS to be manipulated. Alas,
there is no field to change the hard drive parameters nor the type!
The disk manager was a good idea, I have one old 486 PC with a big
Western Digital drive, too big to be supported by the BIOS, and the
EZ-DRIVE disk manager works perfectly here.
However, EZ-DRIVE only accepts to work with Western Digital drives,
and the 2.5" hard disk that I have is from HP. The disk manager
also wants certain settings for the hard disk in the BIOS ...
Still not giving up / one more try: could somebody point me to a
site that has a non-commercial disk manager (for HP or not restricted
to specific HDDs) or even better e-mail a ZIP with such disk manager?
TIA,
- Henk, PA8PDP.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces(a)classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctalk-bounces@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Dr. Ido
Sent: woensdag 20 oktober 2004 13:18
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: RE: access to BIOS of DECpc
At 01:16 PM 10/20/04 +0200, you wrote:
Thanks Dan,
I feel a bit silly, but it was late last night is my excuse.
"DECpc 320P" in Google gave a link to floppy images on a COMPAQ site.
I will try them this evening, but it is good to know that the DECpc
"knows" a limited number of hard disks. If I can 'upgrade' to some
300 Mb of the 420 Mb capacity it is still better than the 40 Mb that
I have available at this point.
If none of the drive types in the BIOS are a close match for
the HDD you want to use you could use a disk manager.
From memory they are still available on the Maxtor
and Seagate
websites, but of course those version only work with Maxtor/Seagate
HDDs. There were commercial versions that weren't restricted to
specific HDDs, but I wouldn't know where to find them.
I've used them before when I've had no other option, they work ok
with DOS/Win9x, no idea about other OS's. 
20 Oct
20 Oct
10:44 p.m.
At 09:52 AM 10/21/04 +0200, you wrote:
I found the SET320P.EXE program on the COMPAQ site, and
it allows
several items 'normally' found in a BIOS to be manipulated. Alas,
there is no field to change the hard drive parameters nor the type!
The disk manager was a good idea, I have one old 486 PC with a big
Western Digital drive, too big to be supported by the BIOS, and the
EZ-DRIVE disk manager works perfectly here.
However, EZ-DRIVE only accepts to work with Western Digital drives,
and the 2.5" hard disk that I have is from HP. The disk manager
also wants certain settings for the hard disk in the BIOS ...
Still not giving up / one more try: could somebody point me to a
site that has a non-commercial disk manager (for HP or not restricted
to specific HDDs) or even better e-mail a ZIP with such disk manager?
Have you tried using a generic CMOS editting program, such as the one built
into QAplus? It may allow you to change options that aren't in the
setup320p program.
I find it strange that there is no option to change the HDD type or
parameters. I've seen other laptops (mainly toshibas) that lacked HDD
options in their setup utils, but they detected the HDD on bootup, no
settings where needed.
It's been a long time since I last installed a disk manager. From memory
the ones that I used (maxblast? ontrack? whatever quantum supplied back in
the day) set the CMOS drive type to 1, but the actual setting is usually
irrelevant. The machine will still boot the hdd with the disk manager on
it even if the drive type is set to something else.
I can't think of any non-commercial versions, but I seem to recall that an
early version (early enough that it was supplied on a 5.25" floppy) of the
Ontrack disk manager that was supplied with various Seagate "retail" hdd
was not restricted to specific hdds.
I may still have a copy, but I have no idea where it is right now. I had
many copies at one stage, but I was a C64\TRS80 user at the time and they
were cheaper than blank disks.
21 Oct
21 Oct
10:53 a.m.
I find it strange that there is no option to change
the HDD type or
parameters. I've seen other laptops (mainly toshibas) that lacked HDD
options in their setup utils, but they detected the HDD on bootup, no
settings where needed.
For what it's worth, here's how I solved this problem. I have
an older ASUS motherboard that doesn't support the 120GB drive
I bought, even with the latest BIOS flashed in.
I actually found two tricks, that may work on other
machines. Note that I use only one partition, and I boot linux,
no mixed-OS complexities here.
One, install two hard disks, where drive0 is known to the BIOS,
and drive1 is manually set to "NONE". BIOS finds drive0 OK,
boots from it, and the OS is configured for two drives. The
BIOS is only used a tBOOT TIME> I got all hung up on trying to
get the BIOS to auto-discover geometry, and finally caught on.
Two, I found that really, the BIOS only needs to know enough
disk geometry to read enough sectors of the front to boot. It
doesn't need to get at the higher cylinders at all -- LIE and
tell it that there's fewer cylinders. The OS gets its info from
the partition table.
I find it hard to believe that even early PCDOS's use the BIOS
calls for disk access beyond booting.
3:53 a.m.
Gooijen H wrote:
I found the SET320P.EXE program on the COMPAQ site,
and it allows
several items 'normally' found in a BIOS to be manipulated. Alas,
there is no field to change the hard drive parameters nor the type!
....
Still not giving up / one more try: could somebody
point me to a
site that has a non-commercial disk manager (for HP or not restricted
to specific HDDs) or even better e-mail a ZIP with such disk manager?
TIA,
- Henk, PA8PDP.
I might have an OnTrack Disk Manager floppy at home. I'll let you know
tomorrow...
--
--- Dave Woyciesjes
--- ICQ# 905818
7215
days inactive
7215
days old
3 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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dr.ido＠bigpond.net.au -
GOOI＠oce.nl -
tomj＠wps.com -
woyciesjes＠sbcglobal.net