[ale] Compaq partitions on servers

Jeff Hubbs Jhubbs at niit.com
Fri May 4 10:12:29 EDT 2001


Rod - 

I've run into this before.  It's a rather troublesome thing that Compaq was
doing for a number of years called the "maintenance partition."  It was a
separate partition with its own filesystem type, and the deal was that if
you hit the right key at the right spot in the bootup, a GUI utility for
BIOS config would launch from that partition.  If you hunt around enough on
Compaq's site, you can download floppy images, burn floppies from those, and
boot to those floppies for making BIOS changes - then you can nuke that
partition on the disk drive, replace the drive, or whatever you want.  

That partition "exists" for real on the drive, but it's not available to you
from Linux.  Linux' fdisk can nuke it and it may even allow you to create
one.  One utility that is available on the floppies (if you make them) is
the ability to create a new maintenance partition, format it, and load the
GUI utils into it.

When you boot it to Linux (even via tomsrtbt, if you haven't actually gotten
Linux on it yet), check the dmesg to see if the kernel detects one of the
buggy CMD640 or RZ1000 EIDE chips (see http://mindprod.com/eideflaw.html for
a treatment).  This is a problem that hurts the operation of most any
multitasking OS on pre-1997 PCI-bus machines.  I have had machines ball up
under Linux and NT both on account of this problem.  If you gather and use
junkers like I do, you have to watch out for this.  There is a kernel config
setting that will include a workaround for the CMD640 that MAY correct the
problem when you recompile, but apparently many of these chips are also just
plan wired up wrong on the mobo.  

The safest bet, if you find that you have one of these buggy controllers
(the page I linked you to above says that as of 10/95, ALL versions of those
two chips are defective) is to simply not use it.  I have an AT&T Globalyst
630 at the house (Micro Seconds was selling them by the truckload w/o RAM or
disk for $20) and I simply dropped a SCSI card and disk in.  On that
machine, the secondary controller was ISA-bus, so I put the CD-ROM there; if
you absolutely had to put an IDE disk drive in, that's where it should go
even though it would be slower.  Alternatively, it's a good excuse to work
up a diskless machine.

- Jeff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rod Young [mailto:development at combiz.net]
> Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 9:45 AM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] Compaq partitions on servers
> 
> 
> What is this for? I have a Prosignia 300 (old p150). It has three 
> partitions(FS, swap, & compaq). 
> Boot up shows the compaq partitionas SDA4 even tho there are 
> only three 
> partitions. Any ideas?
> --
> To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe ale" 
> in message body.
> 
--
To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe ale" in message body.





More information about the Ale mailing list