Re: Steve - Hardware Question

["John Wolgamot" <john@wolgamot.com>]

It's odd... I got the laptop working again but had to jump through hoops
to do it plus I was a bit lucky.

It appears it wasn't the HD after all. It was a corrupt bios.

If your interested in how I came about the resolution to the problem
here it is.

With the HD plugged in... the system would light up and you got the
Compaq logo and then it would go blank.

Take out the HD and the Compaq boot logo would show up and stay.  I
think the floppy drive is bad so I couldn't boot from that but I could
boot from an old win98 cd as long as the HD wasn't plugged in.

But since there was no HD installed I couldn't go anywhere from there.

On the Compaq support site I dl'd the documentation and there was
mention about the system locking during the posting process because of
the bios becoming corrupt.

So I downloaded the latest bios, burnt a bootable CD then burnt the
rompaq.exe rom upgrade onto a separate cd.

The cd was able to boot to a dos prompt. I switched CD's to the one that
had the rompaq bios update. Ran it and it was successful.

I poped the hd back in and it now works.

Hmmmm I really hate to admit that it's working because it will develop
another problem. :-)

Thanks for responding to my query concerning the extra HD

--John




-----Original Message-----
From: luci-discuss-owner@luci.org [mailto:luci-discuss-owner@luci.org]
On Behalf Of Kara Pritchard
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2003 11:37 AM
To: luci-discuss@luci.org
Subject: Re: Steve - Hardware Question

On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, John Wolgamot wrote:

> It worked well but I suspect the hard drive is faulty now. I can't
tell
> for sure and was wondering if you had an extra lying around that you
> could bring to the meeting so I could pop it in as a test to see if
that
> cures the problem.

No we don't.  But we are ordering one for someone else today. 

What are your symptoms?  Do you get BIOS messages when you try to boot?

If not, it's not your HDD.  If you do, it probably is your HDD.  The 
laptop I diagnosed over the weekend just gets a blinking _ and makes bad

noise.  If I boot it off CD with a RH 8 CD it looks fine.  If I look at 
the BIOS, it only reports a 700MB disk (it's a 6GB).  If you boot off a 
WinCD and try to DIR hda it locks up trying to read the directory list 
sizes.  

> If I could pop a hard drive in it and to salvage it, then Rita could
use
> it as a word processor in the bedroom.

Find out what form factor your HDD is, and I can check prices for you.
If 
you're going to waste some money, might as well waste it on something
you 
can resell :)

-- 
Kara Pritchard                          Phone: 618-398-7360
Director of Exam Development            http://www.lpi.org/
--



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