[ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question

[Michael Trausch]

Whoa. I had totally forgotten about those.  There were a few other systems
that did similar things, but instead of putting BIOS on the HD, they'd have
a minimal BIOS in chip format, and the SETUP program would be on floppy or
something.  Of course, most people lost or damaged those floppies...

--
Sent from my ADP1 running Android 2.1

On May 23, 2010 6:31 AM, "Greg Clifton" <gccfof5 at gmail.com> wrote:

Dude, you may be screwed. Older (pre HP) Compaq's had some of the system
BIOS written on the hard drive or some such crap that forced you to buy any
replacement hard drive from Compaq (at ridiculously HIGH price). I once ran
into the problem on an old Compaq notebook that I could not get to boot
after I upgraded the HDD (this was like 15yrs. ago, so I don't think it was
a drive geometry issue that far back since the choice in 2.5" HDDs was
pretty limited). Maybe there is a Compaq format utility on the web somewhere
that would write the required info to the drive, otherwise I doubt it will
work.

GC

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 9:50 PM, Michael Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> >
> > I wrote it in the web browser, so I sent it at gmail time. So, whose got
> the non-sync'd clock: y...
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>
>
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> >
>


_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20100523/b1d5b337/attachment-0001.html