Compaq is evil, Fdisk

[Nick5324]

I have an "old" compaq prosignia 320, and it has a ~6GB hard drive. There is a primary partition of ~2GB, and an ext. partition of ~4GB. The ext. partition claims to have no logical dos drive, but if i try to assigne one, it says it can't b/c one already exists!! I can't delete the ext. partition and make a new one b/c it says there is a logical dos drive, but when i try to delete the logical dos drive in the ext. partition, is says there isn't one! I already don't like compaq b/c of the way there name is all over EVERYTHING on there computers, but i've heard in the past of people having trouble formatting or running fdisk, now i see they were right. Any ideas? Thanks

 

[jkresh]

Partition Magic

 

[corkyg]

Compaq has always been notorious for making their systems as proprietary as they can (they must have learned that from Sony!) They are to be avoided unless you buy off the shelf and leave them alone.

 

[TheOverlord]

some compaqs even had the bios itself on a small partition on the hdd...delete it and *poof* no more computer

 

[Rogue]

You guys are Compaq rookies. Delete the partition with fdisk by selecting it as a non-dos partition. The other statement that the computer was rendered unusable by deleting the BIOS software on the drive partition is false also. Explain to me why I've got about 200 Compaq Deskpros at work with no BIOS partition loaded but they work perfectly fine without it.

 

[Nick5324]

I tried to delete it as a non-DOS partition, it said something to the effect of "there is no non-DOS partition", so this idea is also no go.......... partition magic, partition commander, all wonderful ideas that cost my wonderful money... i wonder if compaq would buy me a copy..... no, no chance

 

[rommel]

well i hate the crap out of compaq too....but i ahve had that happen to me before and it wasnt on a prebuilt system of anykind....try sweitching the boot disk your using.

 

[Sunner]

Try getting hold of a Linux, BSD or WinNT CD, and boot from that, most OS's cept the Win9x series have at least half decent partitioning utilities, at the difference from the pathetic program that is MS-DOS fdisk.