Compaq P1 upgrade issues

[JacobM5727]

my friend has a compaq p1 166mhz desktop
its a deskpro 2000
dunno what mobo, but has an AMD 645 chipset (guess those were the days huh?)

not sure on ram, think hes got 384 megs - upgraded from 128 i believe

can you upgrade hard drives on these? we tried two good drives (know they are good, tested them in other comps..)

it kept giving us hard disk controller failures.. or hard drive failures.. his current drive was around 3 gigs, we were trying tens.. would that be it?

i will get the bios info and such soon.. gotta get around to looking at this thing at my house.. we had been at work (lol)

[paramufay]

yep thats the problem...limitation.

6 or 8 gigs is the limit.

use a disk overlay program to fool the bios

[PresterJohn]

>yep thats the problem...limitation.
>6 or 8 gigs is the limit.

not really. if the bios does not support the larger drives, typically it will format what it sees and just wind up not using the entire drive.

i've seen a number of different older bios where you had to change the LBA settings to get things right. worth a try. also a couple case worked when i manually entered the cyl/head/sector values.

another option is to check if a bios update is available somewhere.

last resort would be to use translation software as paramufay said...

Many old compaqs have a problem - you have the BIOS actually ON the hard drive, in a hidden partition at the front of the drive. HDD size linitation is only one problem in this case. What you need is the BIOS setup disks from the Compaq site you can program the BIOS to accept a different drive. Try getting the floopy software from here: http://www.compaq.com/support/files/...nload/263.html

As to limitation, my Deskpro 4000 has a 8G limit, so you may well need a DDO (dynamic drive overlay) to get the BIOS to use the full over 8G drive.

Hope this helps
Mick

[JacobM5727]

hey mick how do i run that from a floppy if its like 3mb?
and whats this overlay program, where can i get one?

thanks

Missed your reply, sorry Jacob.

I believe the Compuq files have to be run and they then load three floppies for you to use. Running it form a windows DOS box works, as does running it straight from windows explorer (for me in XP, anyway)

As for a DDO - try Maxtor's EZ-BIOS - it seems to be the best of a bad bunch, really. Intructions here: http://www.maxtor.com/products/Diamo...res/24023.html

Cheers
Mick

[JacobM5727]

great i will give it a shot, and thats ok thanks