HP/Compaq Presario and Linux

[Jason Stephenson]

Travis Roy wrote:
>>I'll second this. In fact, every Compaq that I've ever seen does 
>>this. It's usually the last partition on the disk, is roughly 32MB 
>>in size and generally of a type not recognized by Linux fdisk or fips.
> 
> 
> It was actually the first partition and it was 5 GIGS in size.

Guess it varies by model. :) Now that you mention it, I believe the 
partition on my laptop is about 2GB in size, but I'm certain that it is 
partition 4. IIRC the partition was 32MB on a Presario desktop from '95 
that I used until two years ago as a gateway/firewall. It ran OpenBSD 
like a champ.

> You say that like new computers come with rescue CDs.. This Compaq did not. There is a utility to 
> create them to CD-R(W) media, but you're only allowed to do it once.

That's one of the reasons I stopped buying named brand computers several 
years ago. I generally build my own, so I don't have to worry about such 
things. I know, not everyone has that luxury and it isn't helpful in 
answering the question.

> I did manage to finally get FreeBSD working. What I ended up having to do was repartiton the drive, 
> let it recover to partiton 2 (the next one after the rescue partiton). It left the other two new partitions 
> along.
> 
> Linux CDs still would not boot correctly, still no idea why. The only ones I could get were a live 
> rescue CD (not Knoppix). Anything else would just cause the system to reboot.

It's very likely that HP/Compaq have changed a few things. ;) I have not 
had any real issues with my Compaq laptop running either FreeBSD or 
Linux, or even Win98SE that came with it.

Y'know, there might be a setting in the BIOS that turns that silly check 
off. Have you ever seend the Compaq BIOS configuration utility? Nice and 
graphical and all.....Gives me the willies. I'd check my laptop for you, 
but when I installed a 20GB drive on it after I got Linux running, I 
decided not to put the BIOS partition on there. Still works, I just 
can't change the BIOS and it won't sleep properly. Seeing as little as I 
use it these days, it doesn't really matter.