Compaq Presario 7400 Motherboard won't boot from 80GB drive

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cyclops8456
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I'm trying to get an old compaq presario 7400 motherboard to boot from an 80Gb drive. It recognises everything fine and I can install Linux to the drive, just can't get it to boot from the drive. The bios revision ( 686S4 ) reckons it will recognise drives upto 128GB, but it just won't boot.

The board is based on a mitac 5114vu and I've tried flashing the award bios for that board, which has caused even more problems, as it won't even boot from floppy/cd with the 80gb drive plugged in now.

Two questions.

Does anyone know of a bios version that would work with this board and let it boot off the 80gb drive?

Failing that, what's the best way of flashing the bios back to the compaq one so at least it'll recognise the drive? I've tried flashing with awdflash but it says the bios I saved (original one) when I flashed it isn't an award one and so won't flash it back. Also tried with compaq rompaq utility, which says there isn't any device to flash.

Ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Alex.
Rainbow
The UniFlasher
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What BIOS do you have currently there?
This BIOS for Mitac 5114VU does support HDDs up to 128GB:
11/07/2001-VP4-686A-6A5LHM3CC-00
(6a6ljm3c) 5114Vu Ver 2001.11.07

BTW.: Awrdflash won't allow you to flash non-Award BIOS - you can try UniFlash.
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
UniFlash - Flash anything anywhere
edwin
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Sounds like the partition isn't activated to me.
edwin/evasive

Do not assume anything

System error, strike any user to continue...
cyclops8456
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Rainbow,

I've flashed the latest bios version available from Mitac's site. As far as I can remember (not infront of the system in question) the version is the same one you've posted. The problem had me stumped for a while, but after posting this I tried setting the hard drive in question to cable select and it recognised it straight away. This bios was recognising the drive on startup, just seemed to forget about it straight away, but setting cable select seems to have solved one problem.

Thanks for the pointer on UniFlash, already downloaded it, but looks as if I might not need it, depends on the problem below.

Edwin,

The partition is definately set as active. I'm trying to boot in Linux, using the GRUB bootloader, and because of the above fix it now starts to boot but only comes up with a single word on the screen: GRUB. It just sits there at this point, doing nothing else. I had a similar problem before with a drive over 32GB on a different system, but a bios update fixed this. If I use a grub boot disk (floppy) then the system starts and runs fine, no problems, it's just a pain having to have a boot floppy all the time.

So the system now recognises the drive properly with the cable select set on the drive, so like Rainbow said, the bios can recognise upto 128GB drives, but it still won't boot directly off the hard drive.

Any ideas?
Ritchie
BIOS Guru
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Since I haven't had much to do with Linux, and I haven't come across GRUB, I am guessing that GRUB is a Linux thing. If I'm correct this would mean the BIOS is recognising the drive fine and booting from it, and transferring control to the Linux O/S. Linux then attempts to take the boot process further as an O/S and gets stuck on whatever GRUB is before you get to do anything with it.

So I would be looking at either reinstalling Linux (long fix), or preferably, simply rewriting the Linux boot sector and boot files. Since you are unable to boot "fully" with the HDD, you would have to boot from a floppy or CD that gives you the access to do this.

The above in turn assumes your cable select fix also somehow solved the problem of being able to boot to floppies or CDs. If not, booting from floppies is a pretty standard BIOS function, so you might have a bigger problem to solve first; however, be sure that you have looked at different boot sequence settings with the BIOS setup before you go assuming a corrupt or mismatched BIOS image. Could also simply be a dud floppy drive also; I see enough of those.
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