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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm



 
 
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  #11  
Old December 1st 06, 12:48 AM posted to alt.sys.pc-clone.compaq,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.hardware
Trevor Hemsley
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 9
Default Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:41:48 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware,
wrote:

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.


Ah! Thank you; I didn't know that. Maybe I needed a different setup
utility, though sp8126.exe seemed to claim very general applicability.


That page for the 6233X lists SP16085.exe as does the page for the 6233MMX for
the Personal Computer Diagnostics utility. The machines list a different BIOS
though.

I suspect that it's the 6233X as that has an 8GB bug and I'm pretty sure the
model I dealt with hung during boot with a 8GB drive in it. You may find the
diagnostic diskette will boot if you unplug it first.

--
Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK
Trevor dot Hemsley at ntlworld dot com
  #13  
Old December 1st 06, 10:41 PM posted to alt.sys.pc-clone.compaq,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.hardware
Ben Myers
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Posts: 3,432
Default Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm

More than a bug, the BIOS of most Pentium and Pentium MMX systems limits hard
drive capacity to 8GB. Some BIOSes, but probably not Compaq's, allow a
workaround for Linux and software "drive overlay" programs by selecting a "Type
1" hard drive in the BIOS setup.

The other alternative is simply to get an inexpensive IDE controller, e.g.
Promise brand, to which the drives are attached instead of to the system board.

.... Ben Myers

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:48:15 -0600, "Trevor Hemsley"
wrote:

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:41:48 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware,
wrote:

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.


Ah! Thank you; I didn't know that. Maybe I needed a different setup
utility, though sp8126.exe seemed to claim very general applicability.


That page for the 6233X lists SP16085.exe as does the page for the 6233MMX for
the Personal Computer Diagnostics utility. The machines list a different BIOS
though.

I suspect that it's the 6233X as that has an 8GB bug and I'm pretty sure the
model I dealt with hung during boot with a 8GB drive in it. You may find the
diagnostic diskette will boot if you unplug it first.

  #14  
Old December 2nd 06, 12:11 PM posted to comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.hardware,alt.sys.pc-clone.compaq
Alan Adams
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Posts: 1
Default Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm

In message . com
wrote:


Chris F Clark wrote:
What happens if you have only 1 of the 2 drives connected to the
cables?


The current hda is a Maxtor, jumpered as Master-with-slave-present; I
know this is how it is jumpered because it booted properly in that
configuration in its previous machine, but I don't know how to jumper
it as Single-drive (jumper configs not shown on faceplate, don't have
manual, though this info is probably _somewhere_ on the net, sigh).


The majority of Maxtor drives I have encountered don't distinguish
between master and master with slave. The three options are master,
slave, cable select.

A google search of the model number and Jumper usually finds the
information.


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.


Various of my other reclaimed junk boxes have bioses which can't handle
the size of disk now installed, but I just tell the bios the disk is
smaller, and put my kernel image in the part the bios can see, and it
doesn't check, and boots anyway; once Linux is running, it doesn't care
what the bios thinks about the disk. With the Deskpro, the bios tries
to check the disk size, and won't boot it if it sees a discrepancy.



--
Alan Adams, from Northamptonshire

http://www.nckc.org.uk/
  #15  
Old December 4th 06, 08:03 PM posted to alt.sys.pc-clone.compaq,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.hardware
[email protected]
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Posts: 7
Default Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm

Trevor Hemsley wrote:
I'm pretty sure the
model I dealt with hung during boot with a 8GB drive in it. You may find the
diagnostic diskette will boot if you unplug it first.


Yes! With the 10GB drive unplugged, I was finally able to boot the
Compaq Diagnostic floppy, determine the ROM family, get the correct
ROMPaq, and flash the new BIOS.

Many thanks, Trevor, for the clue that made this possible. It is so
counter-intuitive that I wouldn't have thought to try it :-(

For the benefit of anyone else with this problem, I should mention that
there were definite difficulties writing the ROMPaq boot disk under
dosemu (using the current version);
it repeatedly claimed that there was disk failure with the A: drive,
even though before, during and after these attempts, it was possible
without problems to mount, read and unmount MSDOS-formatted disks in
the same physical drive under Linux. Of course, I didn't try to use
the drive under Linux while the ROMPaq extractor was active under
dosemu.

After many tries, the ROMPaq boot disk finally got written; I have no
clue what made the successful attempt different. I saw the same
behavior earlier when preparing the Diagnostics and Setup floppies
under dosemu.

Plugged the 10GB drive back in, ran Setup, and it is correctly
recognized. Still won't boot, though it booted in its previous machine
and I don't think I've done anything that would change the boot data on
the disk. I ran the Diagnostics, and they found no problems with the
disk, controller, cables or anything.

I have a few more things to try; I just ran out of time last weekend
getting this far.

Thanks again, Trevor (and Chris, and others).

  #16  
Old December 5th 06, 08:51 PM posted to alt.sys.pc-clone.compaq,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.hardware
[email protected]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 7
Default Deskpro: can't boot from hd ... SOLVED!

In case it helps someone, here is an account of what it took to get the
Deskpro booting Linux again from its new hard disk. I didn't always
find out the exact nature or cause of the incompatibilities, but I did
get round them. This may not be the shortest or most logical sequence,
but it's what I did and it worked. You need to understand what these
commands do; don't just follow them blindly.

1) Flash the latest BIOS, so that disks larger than 8GB are recognised.
In my case, this required extracting the RAMPaq boot floppy under
dosemu, and disconnecting the large hard disk, which allowed the Compaq
boot floppies to actually boot. Then reconnect the hard disk; the BIOS
now recognizes its size correctly.

2) Run Setup from the Compaq boot floppies. It's unclear what this
actually achieves, since the large drive is already correctly
recognized, but Compaq says you've got to do it.

3) (Actually I did this earlier, but that doesn't matter.) Boot Linux
(I did this from a CD) and back up the important parts of hda onto
something else. I backed up the /boot and / partitions separately onto
a partition of hdb; I ended up not needing the backup of /, but it was
reassuring to have it available. Run fdisk -l /dev/hda and save the
output.

4) [Optional] If you don't currently have a Compaq Diagnostics
partition, create one. This can be tricky and hazardous. The Compaq
utilities will not let you create the partition if the beginning of the
disk is already part of a partition.

[In my case, there was an additional complication: hda had a "protected
data area" at the end. This caused cfdisk to refuse to run at all
("partition ends after end of disk"), so I used fdisk; this is not
problem-free, as it can produce layouts which require special treatment
from Lilo; see below. Andries Brouwer has a utility "setmax" which
claims to, in effect, remove the protected data area, but I found that
it doesn't remove it completely enough; it's safer just to keep your
own partitions clear of the protected area.]

What I did was to boot Linux, delete all the partitions of hda, create
a Compaq Diagnostics
partition, type 0x12, as hda1, then create hda2 to occupy the remainder
of the old hda1; then recreate the remaining old partitions on the same
boundaries that they formerly had, though they will now have different
numbers. If you previously had four or more partitions, you will need
to move one of the primaries into an extended partition, but you can
still use the same cylinder boundaries. If you get it right (be
paranoid), you will find all your filesystems and data in hda3 and
higher numbers preserved after you reboot.

One further paradox: the Compaq utilities don't recognize a new (empty)
Compaq partition created under Linux, so after reserving the space for
it, you have to delete it, write the partition table, boot the Compaq
Diagnostics floppy, and let _that_ create the Diagnostics Partition and
populate it from the floppies.

Then reboot, check that pressing F10 brings up the Diagnostics from the
hard disk; exit; boot Linux from CD; restore the former contents of
hda1 to the current hda2; verify using e2fsck that the filesystems are
still intact in hda3 and higher; edit the fstab of the / partition to
reflect the new partition numbers.

5) Under Linux, run lilo -M mbr /dev/hda to install a master boot
loader; I have no idea what happened to the one previously there; maybe
the Compaq utilities overwrote it (?); modify /etc/lilo.conf to reflect
the new partition numbers, and run lilo -t -v2; if it complains about
the partition table - it did in my case, something about
incompatibility between the CHS and LBA data - then run lilo -P ignore,
to tell it to ignore the partition table; else just run lilo. After the
kernel gets control, it uses the partition table without having the
trouble that lilo had.

Good luck. This took me about 3 hours of trial and error and manpage
reading _after_ I got the BIOS flashed.

 




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