Any Compaq experts out there?

zen · September 25th, 2002, 02:43 PM

Had a guy bring in a Presario 5000 today. Can't understand a word he's saying cause he's slightly foreign. From what I can make out, he might have fdisked the sucker and wiped out the portion of the bios residing on the HDD.

Right now it will turn on fine with everything spinning but I get no video signal whatsoever. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna need the Quick Restore cd to get it semi-functional but my question is this: If you wipe the HDD like he did, is it common to have no video? Will the Quick Restore be bootable? If I cant see anything how can I make it boot from cd?

I've used the Quick recovery cd before but not the Quick restore.TIA

bill1971 · September 25th, 2002, 02:52 PM

Sorry, zen, I'm only expert enough to stay away from Compaqs!

What's the OS?

(zen, people around here know I'm not a one-liner guy. . .)

zen · September 25th, 2002, 02:55 PM

....and getting your post count up.

...How could I possibly know the o\s if its been wiped?

Sorry bill, but it sure looked like a one-liner to me....untill you edited. (BTW, I hate em too.)

vass0922 · September 25th, 2002, 02:57 PM

I would think regardless you'd have a BIOS screen, albeit a COMPAQ boot up screen

Have you tried swapping vid cards to test it out?
I'm assuming this is a known good monitor you're testing with?

zen · September 25th, 2002, 02:59 PM

Yeah vass, tried another vid card with same results. So you think I should still have a bios screen even if he wiped all partitions? Was kinda what I was wondering.

bill1971 · September 25th, 2002, 03:03 PM

zen:
Can you call this guy and ask the OS? Also, can you get into the
actual BIOS, or will it not display at all, either?

- Bill

zen · September 25th, 2002, 03:06 PM

Pretty sure it had ME (oh great!). Also pretty sure nothing is on it presently. The guy was pretending to know what he was doing and wiped out whatever bios resides on the HDD. I thought it was only part of it though and I would at least get something on the display.

maface · September 25th, 2002, 03:10 PM

Have you looked on Compaqs website. They have setup disks you can download

Jeordiewhite · September 25th, 2002, 03:15 PM

THe bios resides on a little chip on the mobo, so get that idea out of your head. He mighta let the air out of the board with a little zap of static electricity.

originel · September 25th, 2002, 03:19 PM

wait a second.... what BIOS resides on the HDD? maybe i don't know something about Compaqs, but AFAIK the only thing on the hdd is the MBR, partition tables, and the actual data. have you tried booting it w/o any drives or extraneous hardware? it sounds to me like something is causing the mobo not to boot.

also maybe he meant to say he flashed the bios incorrectly (formatted the bios in a sense), which would (quite) effectively corrupt the BIOS.