On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 02:36:54AM +0100, Johan Danielsson wrote:
> "Jared D. McNeill" <jmcneill@invisible.yi.org> writes:
> > > Is there any special trick I need for Compaq??
> > I had an older Compaq 486 (with a Pentium OverDrive chip in it) for a
> > while -- believe it or not the setup program was available on a floppy
> > image from Compaq. It booted DOS and ran the setup program from there.
> > This might be somethign to look in to -- check compaq's web site for it.
> F10 might do the trick, the Compaqs I've wrestled with have flashed
> the cursor in the upper right corner when you're supposed to press the
> magic key. Otherwise you need a special boot floppy set.

Compaq use a scheme where the BIOS setup is in a partition on the hard disk
(it's basically a DOS filesystem with a different partition ID). The BIOS
prints 'Press F10 to enter setup' if it detects this partition on the boot
disk during bootstrap. If you don't have this partition, you can download the
BIOS configuration software and make a set of floppies which effectively does
the same thing (the floppies also give you the opportunity to create the hard
disk based partition - obviously, you can't do this if you're already using
all of the disk).

Hope this helps,

Ian.