Compaq Laptop question

[Charles C. Bennett, Jr.]

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


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Charles C. Bennett, Jr.				Workgroup Technology Corp.
Principal Software Engineer,			91 Hartwell Ave.
Distributed Object Computing			Lexington, MA 02421

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