On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:59:04 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware,
wrote:

The Problem Machine is one of the Compaqs from about 1997/8 without a
"real"
BIOS.

BTW, it *does* have a BIOS and it *is* flashable. The bit that resides on that
weird partition is the configuration utility for it, not the BIOS itself. From
your description of it as a P-II, 233MHz I would guess that it's one of these
models -
http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/fi...?lang=en&cc=us
and probably the 6233X or 6233MMX since a 5233MMX is a Pentium I not a II. If
you take the link from that page for the 6233X then you can choose MS-DOS as its
o/s on the next page and the first thing listed is a flash BIOS for it - you
want the 3rd link down which will create a boot diskette and flash your BIOS.
You might need to unplug your big hard disk first since one of the issues listed
as fixed is " Adds support for hard drives larger than 8 gigabytes.".

--
Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK
Trevor dot Hemsley at ntlworld dot com