access to BIOS of DECpc

From: Dr. Ido <dr.ido_at_bigpond.net.au>
Date: Thu Oct 21 02:44:39 2004

At 09:52 AM 10/21/04 +0200, you wrote:
>I found the SET320P.EXE program on the COMPAQ site, and it allows
>several items 'normally' found in a BIOS to be manipulated. Alas,
>there is no field to change the hard drive parameters nor the type!
>
>The disk manager was a good idea, I have one old 486 PC with a big
>Western Digital drive, too big to be supported by the BIOS, and the
>EZ-DRIVE disk manager works perfectly here.
>However, EZ-DRIVE only accepts to work with Western Digital drives,
>and the 2.5" hard disk that I have is from HP. The disk manager
>also wants certain settings for the hard disk in the BIOS ...
>
>Still not giving up / one more try: could somebody point me to a
>site that has a non-commercial disk manager (for HP or not restricted
>to specific HDDs) or even better e-mail a ZIP with such disk manager?

Have you tried using a generic CMOS editting program, such as the one built
into QAplus? It may allow you to change options that aren't in the
setup320p program.

I find it strange that there is no option to change the HDD type or
parameters. I've seen other laptops (mainly toshibas) that lacked HDD
options in their setup utils, but they detected the HDD on bootup, no
settings where needed.

It's been a long time since I last installed a disk manager. From memory
the ones that I used (maxblast? ontrack? whatever quantum supplied back in
the day) set the CMOS drive type to 1, but the actual setting is usually
irrelevant. The machine will still boot the hdd with the disk manager on
it even if the drive type is set to something else.
I can't think of any non-commercial versions, but I seem to recall that an
early version (early enough that it was supplied on a 5.25" floppy) of the
Ontrack disk manager that was supplied with various Seagate "retail" hdd
was not restricted to specific hdds.

I may still have a copy, but I have no idea where it is right now. I had
many copies at one stage, but I was a C64\TRS80 user at the time and they
were cheaper than blank disks.
Received on Thu Oct 21 2004 - 02:44:39 BST