First post, by tokyoracer
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I finally managed to find another one of these machines that actually works (a 524 CDS). Well, mostly anyway. I swapped some bits around and now I'm fairly happy with it, but I'm having a hell of a time trying to get a modern hard drive replacement as the thing arrived with the original drive which is faulty.
No big deal, or so I thought! The problem is that during this period, Compaq thought it would be a good idea to put a BIOS on the hard drive in a 'secret' partition.
So if I was to use say a 40GB drive I have spare, I can't actually use more than 5% of it's capacity. At least with DOS 6.22/Win 3.11 which I intend on using on this. Plus,
I can't get the drive overlay to work either because I'm pretty sure it needs the parameters set on the BIOS first before formatting one.
So in short, I feel like I'm in a catch-22 situation.
I tried installing DOS as a 2.1GB partition anyway, leaving the rest to gather dust (metaphorically speaking) but when I power it back on it loses it.
Am I stuck with using small drives on this machine? Is there anyone else that has one of these Compaq machines with the BIOS on the hard drive?
I did try the drivers on this site supposibly for this machine and tried to make a couple of OEM disks from the .EXE but both threw up an error and didn't attempt to write anything onto a disk. Tried various known working floppy disks too.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
P.s. If you feel this is best moved to the software section, please feel free to do so. Not entirely sure where this issue sits on this forum.