View Single Post
  #1  
Old September 20th 03, 02:33 PM
Richard
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default clear CMOS/ reset BIOS on Professional Workstation 5100

(sorry it's a long post but if you read on you may be amused
at my stupidity and you may be able to help me - I hope!)

I bought a 2nd hand pw5100 with a single PII 333. I added
another PII 333 and the relevant VRM, and got a replacement
18.2GB Wide-Ultra SCSI drive.
During my building of the machine I disconnected the floppy
and booted the machine. It recognised the lack of floppy drive
and changed the BIOS configuration to disable the floppy
controller.
I had already copied the Setup program onto the SCSI drive
and could enter that happily by pressing F10 when the flashing
blob appeared top-right.
I then installed RedHat Linux 9, and naively selected the GRUB
boot loader to boot from the RedHat partition with no option
of booting the "DOS" partition where the Compaq Setup
program is stored. I thought I would be able to enter this
by pressing F10 before RedHat booted. I can't. I have tried
many times and it always boots into RedHat. I also tried
removing the Keyboard. This gave a keyb error and halted
boot - "press F2 to continue". Even then pressing F10 did
nothing and pressing F2 continued the RedHat boot.
So I now want to re-enable the floppy drive and sound card,
and need to access the Setup program to do so. I can't boot
from the floppy as it is disabled in BIOS. I can't access the
Setup partition. If I remove the SCSI drive I can boot from
CD, but even with a different SCSI drive in I can't load the
Setup program onto the SCSI drive as I have no floppy.

I think I have the following options.
1) configure GRUB to allow booting the Setup Partition. I am
a complete newbie to Linux, so I haven't a clue how to. (If
anyone can offer help on this then I would be grateful too. Or
can you tell me where to look for help files about Grub?)
2) reset BIOS to default settings which I guess would re-enable
the floppy controller. I know and have used the switch to disable
the boot password, but is there a jumper or keyboard sequence
to reset BIOS?
3) make a bootable CD with the Compaq Setup on. I know it
will be read-only, but I think this would work, but I don't know
how to unpack the Softpaqs. I can't even read them from floppy
on a Windows machine - they appear as non-formatted. Any
advice?
4) remove all linux partitions on the SCSI drive. I think this will
just make the whole disc into a non-bootable non-system disc.
5) remove the CMOS battery for a few hours. Will this reset
defaults? Or will it kill the whole BIOS? Or most likely will it do
nothing except upset the system clock, as probably all Setup
details reside in EPROM anyway.
6) put up with the current Setup forever
7) bin it!

Looking forward to all your thoughts.

Richard