Compaq Laptop question

[cyoung at bbnplanet.com (Chuck Young)]

It helps a ton.  Thanks.  I will pass it on to Leslie, who is trying to
make it all come together as a newcomer to linux.

Chuck Young
GTE Internetworking

On Fri, 21 May 1999, Charles C. Bennett, Jr. wrote:

> Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 23:29:13 -0400
> From: "Charles C. Bennett, Jr." <ccb at kukla.tiac.net>
> To: discuss at Blu.Org
> Subject: Re: Compaq Laptop question 
> 
> 
> On the issue of Compaq diagnostic partitions: they don't eat much,
> let them be.  On a lot of Compaq systems the junk in the diagnostic
> partition is the only interface to the BIOS.
> 
> How do I know?  I've been there.  Last year Microwarehouse was blowing
> out Compaq Profession Workstation 5000 systems for $899.  These are
> PPro systems with a second CPU socket and Symbios/NCR 53c875 UltraWide
> SCSI on the motherboard.  We bought 2!  I originally thought that
> the junk at the beginning of the disk was trash and blew it away during
> the Red Hat installation.  Then I bought some memory and went hunting
> for the BIOS - OOOPS!  Fortunately the Compaq OEM kit has an option to
> put the system back the way they shipped it.
> 
> I then re-did the installation, leaving the Compaq partition alone.
> At the end of the installation I configured Lilo to treat that
> partition as an Other partition bootable as "compaq".
> 
> Everything from there out was fine.  If I needed to get to the
> diagnostics, I just told Lilo to boot Compaq and away we went.
> In reality it was just a 35MB DOS partition with a custom Win3.1
> application.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> ccb
> 
> 
> ---
> Charles C. Bennett, Jr.				Workgroup Technology Corp.
> Principal Software Engineer,			91 Hartwell Ave.
> Distributed Object Computing			Lexington, MA 02421
> 
> "Talking about music is like tap dancing about architecture" - Laurie Anderson
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