Compaq Deskpro 5100

**Knight-templar** · 28th January 2004

Trying to fix one of these for a friend of mine, it's an old machine that he has been given. It was running Win' 95 and giving illegal operations all over the shop so I decided to flatten it and start again. Looking at the drive in fdisk (booted from a '98 floppy) it showed a primary DOS partition of 97% and a non DOS partition of 3%, I binned both and made one new Primary DOS one of 100%. When I then Rebooted from the floppy, I have an a: drive, a c: drive but no CD-ROM...............Argghhhhh!! tried a different CD, no joy. tried to get into the BIOS in every way i know.. no good. then I heard a rumour, from a bloke with a little knowledge of many things, but no solution to any..that Compaq (and others) sometimes put a seperate partition ( 3% by any chance) on the drive that contains vital bootup information... Just wondered if any knows anything about this, has come across it before and maybe knows how to sort it. Surely someone must have replaced a duff HDD in one of these before and therefore would not have had this "partition" ???? As it is, i could put the drive in another machine and install windows from CD then put it back in his machine, but we would still have no CD-ROM...if the win'98 disk cannot find it I doubt if windows will..it's like it's been disabled in the bios but I can't get into that to 'kin change it..AAAGGGHHHHH!!!
Someone help me out here please, I went to do the guy a favour and am now looking a right p r i c k..

Regards
KT

**shed2000** · 28th January 2004

Dunno if this will help but its worth a look
http://web14.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FAQ5473

**Knight-templar** · 29th January 2004

Downloaded these just now, will try them on his machine at weekend, they certainly look to be what I am needing. thanks for all your help, I will let you know how I get on. By the way, how did you begin to search for such a thing...I am bobbins with search engine stuff me!
Kindest regards
KT