Rat
01-12-2001, 07:18 PM
Yeah, here we go.... My wife's boss sends a Compaq 4712 home with her along with a 10 gig WD hdd and Time Wolf software. He also wants more memory and a fresh OS install. Ok, I say, so off comes the cover and in goes the hdd and 64MB of SIMM ($160 for the memory), out with the old 2.5 gig Bigfoot. Boot, hdd is not recognized correctly, no biggie, pop in the EZ BIOS and old hdd. do a Auto Install and still no boot. Hmmmm.... put 'ol Bigfoot in and put the WD in as slave and go to Setup. Find out that 8.4 is the max for this computer. Snatch out the WD, Put it in my IBM, run the EZ BIOS Auto Install and leave it in the IBM (made sure the copy went well first). Pulled the 8.4 Seagate from the IBM, put it in the Compaq, do the EZ BIOS Auto Install off the Bigfoot and try it out, no go, comp won't recogniz the drive, can't get into Setup. Run Fdisk to make sure the Non-DOS partition is there, it's there. Disconnected the drive and booted with a Compaq Setup floppy, and checked the drive parameters. AHA! the disc type was correct, but the # of cyl's was off by 2.... supposed to be 16,368 was set at 16,366! set it to 16,368, exited Setup and powered down. hooked up the hdd, popped out the floppy and powered up......SUCCESS!! Formatted the drive and did a clean install of Winders98SE. All seems to be running good, set the swap to the F: partition (I set up the drive in 4 partitions), installed the modem and lan. Now we try and install the Time Wolf. CD ROM won't see the disc.... hmmm... try the disc in another computer.... won't see it there either... Got a bad Time Wolf CD.... Oh welll.... turns out the Time Wolf was free when he bought Quickbooks, now we know why it was free. Now he has a faster compaq and 8.4 gig he will never fill. Had to convince him the Seagate 8.4 was worth more than the WD 10.0 and is a better drive.
moral of this story.... check your system carefully before you try to install new hardware; make sure it will fit. Also, I hope this will help anyone with a Compaq with the same probs installing non-Compaq hdd's.
moral of this story.... check your system carefully before you try to install new hardware; make sure it will fit. Also, I hope this will help anyone with a Compaq with the same probs installing non-Compaq hdd's.