HP/Compaq Presario and Linux

[Benjamin Scott]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, at 11:19am, dan at rastech.com wrote:
> I've encountered similar things before. In my cases, I found it was a boot
> partition, not the BIOS, which was enforcing the "repair." I just deleted
> the small boot partition, and rewrote the boot sector, and the problem
> went away. YMMV.

  Keep in mind that many Compaq's keep the "BIOS setup" program on disk,
where just about everything else keeps it in firmware.  That means that if
you blow away the utility partition, you can no longer do anything useful to
configure the BIOS.

  This is especially fun when the RAID management utility you need to run to
fix your broken RAID array is on the broken RAID array.

  These same Compaq's do have BIOS routines which scribble in the MBR during
POST, but AFAIK, they just play with the active partition flags.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
| The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do  |
| not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. |
| All information is provided without warranty of any kind.              |