HardwareBanter - View Single Post - Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm

**Chris F Clark**

writes (replying to me ):
....
How do you have the partition(s) on the 1st hard drive laid out?

hda1: 20MB ext2 kernel images and boot maps; placed first in case the
BIOS has the
cylinder 1024 problem; ext2 so I can use kernels too small to
have ext3 builtin.
hda2: ~3GB ext3; active; Linux root
hda3: ~128 MB Linux swap
hda4: extended partition containing:
hda5: ~3GB Linux data
hda6: ~3.6GB Linux data

The layout looks good. I do similar things myself (and also to the
2nd drive so that the drives are "portable") just like you have done.

What happens if you have only 1 of the 2 drives connected to the
cables?

What happens if you replace the 1st drive with the old 2.1GB drive?

These are last-resort questions I'll investigate if I can't find a
software solution. The mechanical design of the machine is compact
(read as "awkward and cramped"), and it has to be dissassembled like a
sliding-block puzzle just to get at some of the disk connectors; to
actually replace the disks is no fun at all.

I ask because of Trevor's reply. I've heard that was a common problem
with machines of that vintage. I have a DELL from that time, that
simply truncates the disk to 8GB if it is larger, but I never tried
booting from the larger disks, just used them for 2nd "data" drives.

Is the 1790 error message from the BIOS?

It's from the resident stub of the boot firmware. There's no ROM BIOS
such as most pc clones have. That functionality lived on the
manufacturer-provided 2MB partition on the original hda, which I
overwrote :-). The Compaq utility I downloaded claimed to provide
equivalent functionality by either restoring the setup partition
(destroying the existing partitioning in the process) or creating setup
floppies.

My guess is that this software has specific functionality to enable
"large" (e.g. 2 GB) disks. You may not be able to boot the machine
(from the hard disk) unless that software is loaded, and thus it needs
to be in the MBR of the hard disk. That is, of course, only a guess.

Are there "drive parameters" set in your BIOS?

The "drive parameters" seem to be stored in NVRAM, but the user
interface to change them isn't resident; at one point I got a message
saying "drive 0 has changed - you must re-run setup". This is what I
am now attempting to do. I got the machine second-hand, without
manuals or software, and just used the configuration it came with.

Well, that sounds like a good thing to try.

At this point, I think you know more about your problem and potential
solutions than I can offer, so I'll just wish you the best of luck.

Cheers,
-Chris