Jeffrey D Angus wrote:

Meat Plow wrote:

On Sun, 25 Apr 2010 14:57:49 -0500, Jeffrey D Angus
wrote:

Meat Plow wrote:

On Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:42:58 -0400, Jamie
wrote:

some Laptops have a partition on the HD that has special set up
software at boot time to configure the proprietary onboard chips..
This also could be an issue..

What laptop(s) would have this feature?

Compaq, they were nortorious for having a special partition they
would fail to boot if they didn't find.


I've never owned a Compaq laptop but working in the industry when
Compaq was the workstation of choice I would have thought I'd read
about it somewhere. This must have been really proprietary as I've
never heard of a chipset needing to load code from a fixed drive
during boot. Can you give me an example of a model number and year
and what operating system? Not that I don't believe you I'm just a bit
taken back that onboard chips could be so proprietary that they
couldn't be produced with their own non-volitile embedded instruction
sets.


The Compaq Presario series comes to mind. They had a special 1-2 meg
partition on the hard drive that the bios looked for and not finding,
would hang the system. "OS NOT FOUND"

I found out the hard way, loading SCO Unix on one, going through the
entire ordeal of loading the operating system (and mistaking wiping
the service partition, then rebooting and finding I had to (a) replace
the service partition and reload the service software and (b) start
from scratch again with SCO Unix install.

Jeff


Fun, isn't it