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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
Posting to c.o.l.s because machine runs only Linux, to a.s.p.c because
it's clearly a Compaq firmware issue, and to c.o.l.h because the firmware might as well be hardware, since I don't (yet) know how to change it. This problem is not for the faint of heart. I have read the manuals on the Compaq website, tried the obvious remedies (see below for gory details) and they haven't worked. My other Linux machines work just fine :-) The Problem Machine is one of the Compaqs from about 1997/8 without a "real" BIOS. It's a compact desktop Pentium II 233Mhz 96MB 2.1GB+2.4GB. There is no obvious way to tell its exact model number, but at boot time the screen displays "Deskpro 4000", a category containing at least 20 models. When I installed Linux on this machine, it had its original HDs which had been used for Windows 9x. I deleted the Diagnostic/ Setup partition, not knowing any reason not to :-), repartitioned and reformatted for Linux. There was no problem - Linux booted fine from the first HD or floppy or CD. When I wanted more HD space, I replaced the first HD (HD0, or /dev/hda) with a known good one containing a bootable Linux, and also replaced the second HD with a larger one. (The first HD is now a Maxtor 10GB, and the second a Western Digital 10GB. I mention the manufacturers because I have heard rumors of boot-time incompatibility of certain pairs of drives, but I have no definite info. 10GB is also , I think, greater than a magic number - 8.x GB? - in certain kinds of BIOS firmware.) There are no MSDOS or Windows partitions. Now the Compaq firmware won't boot from the HD ("1790 - Disk 0 error"), and it wants me to run the Compaq setup utility (at one point it displayed "If you are running Unix, you still need to use the Compaq utility to configure the hard disk"). The new first HD is in fact present and functioning, because I can boot its active partition from a SmartBootManager floppy, or mount, read and write it when booted from a Linux CD. No problems with the second HD or the floppy drive either, once booted. So I didn't _obviously_ botch the hardware replacement, though there may still be something subtly wrong. The new first HD was the first HD of two on the same controller in its previous machine, and also in its current machine. I just left its jumpers as they were, though I have no key for how they should be. OK. I downloaded the self-extracting archive sp8126.exe (PC Diagnostic and Setup Utilities) from the Compaq website, verified it using unzip -vt on another Linux machine and ran it under dosemu (because I don't have an MS machine). The resulting 2 setup/diagnostic boot disks will happily boot to menus on this other machine, but on the Problem Machine, they each just give "Starting MS-DOS" followed by a hang. FWIW, soft reboot (shutdown -r now) also hangs (and always did) under Linux on the Problem Machine even if I've booted from a CD which remains in the drive. The floppy drive is OK, because I was able using the "other" machine to create two different bootable floppies (FreeDos and SmartBootManager) which successfully boot on the Problem Machine. I found an apparently similar case on the net where someone claimed that the problem could be solved (and the setup utilities could be run) by moving the floppy drive to "the other connector on the ribbon cable, the one without the twist". On the Problem Machine, there is no such other connector, and never has been, and if there were, it is not clear how it would help, because it would presumably move the floppy drive to the B: role (/dev/fd1), which is not supposed(?) to be bootable at all, whereas I can currently at least boot SmartBootManager or FreeDos from A: (/dev/fd0). I'm fairly indifferent about actually restoring the setup partition, since Compaq says the setup can be run from floppies, and I don't expect to need to run it often; but I would _really_ like to be able to boot the Problem Machine from its present HD. Any clues will be much appreciated. -D |
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
Chris F Clark wrote:
Which boot loader are you using on the problem machine, LILO or GRUB? On hda, Lilo; of course, when I boot a floppy or a cd, these use whatever they have on them. 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 This is off the top of my head; I'm not at home right now. What partitions do you have on the 2nd drive? Pretty similar. I like this sort of layout because you can just move it to the hda position in another machine and it's ready to go. 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. 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. 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. |
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:59:04 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware,
wrote: Now the Compaq firmware won't boot from the HD ("1790 - Disk 0 error"), and it wants me to run the Compaq setup utility (at one point it displayed I had Deskpro 2000's of a similar vintage that had an 8GB BIOS bug and refused to boot if a hard disk greater than that was installed. They also issued the 1790 (or maybe some other 17xx) message. -- Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK Trevor dot Hemsley at ntlworld dot com |
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
wrote in message ups.com... I found an apparently similar case on the net where someone claimed that the problem could be solved (and the setup utilities could be run) by moving the floppy drive to "the other connector on the ribbon cable, the one without the twist". On the Problem Machine, there is no such other connector, and never has been, and if there were, it is not clear how it would help, because it would presumably move the floppy drive to the B: role (/dev/fd1), which is not supposed(?) to be bootable at all, whereas I can currently at least boot SmartBootManager or FreeDos from A: (/dev/fd0). -D Actually all floppy drives are jumpered as "B" or second drive by default. The twist in the end connector converts that "B" drive back to an "A." The middle jumper has no twist so the drive connected there already is detected as a "B" drive. This was done so that OEMs or users would not have to change jumpers. Some floppy drives have the jumper connections permanently soldered together. -- Earl F. Parrish |
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
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 |
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
The Problem Machine is one of the Compaqs from about 1997/8 without a "real" BIOS. BTW, it *does* have a BIOS Well yes; I was trying to be brief, and "real" seemed better than "of the kind we're familiar with from most other pc-clones". 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. Ah! Thank you; I didn't know that. Maybe I needed a different setup utility, though sp8126.exe seemed to claim very general applicability. I spent a while at the Compaq site searching without success for a list of the attributes of the models so as to identify which one I had. Does anyone know what distinguishes the X from the MMX? 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. Having lost some functionality by acting without all the necessary information (gasp!), and having had one possible fix inexplicably fail, I'm reluctant to do something irreversible which could destroy the remaining functionality if done less than perfectly. Remember, I don't have a real MSDOS (although I had one in 1997 that's probably still in my junk^H^H^H^Harchives), so thus far I've done all the DOS stuff in dosemu or FreeDos, which risks subtle incompatibilities. That said, thanks again, and I'll look into what's at the location you cited. (Does any one know if Compaq incorporate extensive sanity/applicability checks into their BIOS upgrade software, thus reducing the likelihood of User Error being catastrophic?) (Does anyone know a way to recover from a BIOS upgrade later determined to be bad, other than taking the PROM/NVRAM off the motherboard and using a special device to reprogram it?) |
#10
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Deskpro: can't boot from hd, or run setup from floppy; not newbie, have rtfm
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). 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. |
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