Is this really true about Compaq's Bios?

[MJT2k]

<< &quot;The BIOS on all compaq's is on the hard drive&quot; WRONG

Compaq did it for like 1 freakin model line and people think they still do it

It was around 1997!! Welcome to 2001 they dont do it anymore >>



WRONG!!!!!!! They did this on all models that used a riser card in them. Any Compaq system that uses an ATX Motherboard has only the Motherboard BIOS.

What I don't get is that the HD BIOS on these is just the CMOS on a &quot;standard&quot; motherboard. The said part about it is that it takes more space than just DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 for workgroups.

 

[TruculentTucan]

and compaq strikes again....

 

[PELarson]

<< I have an older Compaq Presario 4784. It is about 5 years old. Is it true that these model Compaqs have the Bios on the Hard Drive and not the motherboard? What happens when you go to replace the hard drive? I want to upgrade my hard drive to a Western Digital 20 gig? What will happen as far as having a Bios? >>



If part of the BIOS is on the hard drive and you add a new hard drive without running some kind of imaging program, or you don't have the setup disks. Then you won't be able to access the portion of the BIOS that is resident on the motherboard. If you go into BIOS and check the menu there should be a selection for creating utility disks. When you put the new hard drive in, if the BIOS can handle the size, BIOS will detect it and require you to press F1 or F2. After it is up run the utility disks and you should be good to go.

 

[ginky4]

Let me ask you this, If I did a format on the original Compaq 4.3 hard drive and completely wiped it out would it also wipe out the part of the Bios that is supposed to be stored on it?

 

[PELarson]

<< Let me ask you this, If I did a format on the original Compaq 4.3 hard drive and completely wiped it out would it also wipe out the part of the Bios that is supposed to be stored on it? >>



Doing only a format will do no harm. The part of the Compaq BIOS that resides on the hard drive is on its own partition. As someone wrote before, if you run the MS-DOS version of FDISK choosing selection 4 you will see a small non-DOS partition at the beginning of the disk.