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Do Compaq computers need a certain brand of hard drive?

B

BPiersol

Member
My fathers Compaq desktop's hard drive puked out on him. I am considering replacing it with a used one. The guy he took it to told him that Compaq is fussy about the hard drives. I would assume this is a mobo issue if it is even an issue at all. I do not know what model of Compaq he has, I haven't gotton it back from the guy he took it to yet. I do know that it has a floppy, cdrom, basic ports on the mobo (nothing fancy), no usb in the front. It is an AMD K-6 II 450 with a 6.4 (I think) hard drive. Anybody have any ideas on this one?
 
Compaq's will take any kind of hard drive, assuming it's a standard IDE.
If someone tells you that you need to special order a compaq hard drive, thats just insane.
(i've worked on a lot of compaq's... ugh)
 
That's exactly what I thought. My father told me that, and I told him that the guy had no idea what he was talking about, but I'd check into it. Thanks!
 
Certain older Compaq's have some parts of the BIOS on a small 10-12mb partition in Fat12 format? I got rid of the drive in an old Compaq I had and lost some functions of the BIOS...but the PC did work fine afterwards...
 
Originally posted by: dbwillis
Certain older Compaq's have some parts of the BIOS on a small 10-12mb partition in Fat12 format? I got rid of the drive in an old Compaq I had and lost some functions of the BIOS...but the PC did work fine afterwards...
Click to expand...

Now that's something I didn't know.... but everything (Windows) ran fine afterwards? Thanks for the info!
 
On Compaqs, there is usually one type of hidden partition or another. The older ones have it at the beginning and it holds some BIOS-type info on the system and some test utilities. Newer ones with large drives have just about everyting that came pre-installed on your system in the hidden partition - sort of like an on-board "Restore CD".
. You can DL the CPQ "Service Packs" to recreate the older "Non-DOS partition" from the Compaq/HP web site. All you need to know is your model no. The files make some bootable diskettes and I'm fairly sure they have to be used on a bare drive.
.bh.
😎
 
the only probs i've had working on them is that the older ones were fussy about hdd size. even with bios updates, they seem to be rather limited. this is first gen pentium stuff tho. never ran into a compaq taking a certain ~type~ of drive tho, especially considering some of the crap drives they've used over the years. *coughcoughTRIGEMcough*

~erik
 
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