I have two Compaq (spit spit) Penti

[DavidBeoulve]

I have two Compaq (spit spit) Pentium 75's that will not use my Floppy drive nor boot from an old 320mb drive.

Although the CMOS is configured and recognizes the floppy, the 320 and the 1gig (no OS, secondary HDC, slave), neither the Legend 406CE and the 2200? will work.

A friend of mine said the 320mb drive may have Stealth C virus?  I remember that from the good old days, but I'm not sure.

Advice guys?  Is Compaq vengeful against non-proprietary parts?  How to clean off Stealth, if it's there?  What's the most likly problem?  (including pilot error)

I have Partition Magic 5, a Win2000 Pro and a Win ME workstation.

Oh, forgot to mention, the 320mb hard drive has Win98 (with DOS 7, for Chuck Yeager and Falcon3 goodness) installed on it.  

This drive BOOTS JUST FINE on my WinME Duron 850.

It does not boot at all on the Compaqs.  I have to disable the floppy drive (on both) just to get them to TRY to boot from the HD (well reconfiguring the boot order might have worked).

DRIVE NOT BOOTABLE or something, then halts.

http://www.useit.com

 

[paulwood]

The older Compaq's had a hidden partition on the hard drive which held configuration details, this is accessed during bootup by holding down the F10 key when a cursor appears in the top right corner of the screen. It then looks like you are accessing CMOS but it is this hidden partition. Later Compaq's had this code moved to the BIOS for speed reasons.

In the past I have downloaded a Paq from the website which reinstalled the hidden partition on a laptop. Maybe this is still available for desktops.

Good Luck