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Compaq Prolinea 466

D

David_M

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Melbourne, Australia
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I just obtained a 486 DX100 Compaq but I'm having issues getting to the BIOS.

The IDE drive is came with sounds like its had a head crash.

It happily counts RAM up to 8MB, it then accesses the floppy to detect its presence.
and then... nothing.

I've tried it with the faulty hard drive, no hard drive and also with a different hard drive.
It doesn't attempt to access the fkoppy again and as far as I can tell it doesn't try to access the hard drive either.

I've tried to get into the BIOS using the standard keys F1, F2, F10, ESC and DEL nothing seems to work.
I does recognise the keyboard is present, if I press a key to early it displays a keyboard error message.
 
1: This needs to be in the Later PCs category. This is not a Pentium.
2: MOBO might be fried. Good luck! Did you replace the CMOS battery?
 
vwestlife said:
These Compaqs have BIOS setup loaded from disk. It is not in ROM.
Click to expand...

From what I can find they normally have a hidden partition for setup. Of course the old links people posted to download the tools are all dead links now.
I cant even get it to attempt to boot from floppy at this stage or access option ROMs on cards
 
I have one of these myself (although mine is only a DX2-66) and have dealt with a flat CMOS battery in it. With a flat battery it should moan about the time/date and settings not being set then restart, then you should end up with a screen where you can press F1 to continue and it should then attempt a floppy boot followed by a hard drive boot if the hard drive is working and can be auto-detected.

I'm not sure that your machine isn't faulty. Even without the correct CMOS settings set it should still boot from a floppy drive at least.

If you do manage to get it going from the floppy, the CMOS setup linked to above does have an option to re-instate the hidden partition if it has become corrupted/the hard drive has been replaced. IIRC once you've done that you can then hammer F10 at startup to load setup from the hard drive.

As an aside, it seems a bit odd that Compaq persevered with disk based CMOS setup programs as long as they did. This approach carried on even in their Pentium machines up until about 1998 which was several years after everyone else moved to ROM-based setup. On the other hand, not being constrained by the capacity of a ROM did enable them have a graphical setup program with mouse support in the mid-90's, something which has only become commonplace in the 2010's.
 
I put a POST card into the machine

The final sequence I get is ...
A0 - Start of diskette tests
A6 - FDC passed reset
A8 - Start to determine drive type
FF - Unknown
After a short delay
27 - Initialize parallel printer
FF - Unknown

After it initialises the printer port it according to the POST number sequence should start to look for option ROMS but that never happens.
I have no idea why it would hang at the stage it does though, seems unlikely it would hang configuring a printer port.

Edit: This time when I powered it up with a card that has an option ROM it got past the old failure point and complained about the CMOS setting checksum and the hard drive type.
I managed to restart it and have it even attempted to boot both from floppy (got a div by zero error) and hard drive it faled to boot because the parameters where different to its auto detect. So I replaced that card with a network card fitted with XT-IDE firmware but it went back to its old behaviour. Even putting back the other card didnt help.
So now I'm waiting for my desoldering station to heat up so i can replace the old lithium button battery with a button battery holder.
 
Last edited:
T-R-A said:
That's assuming the original drive hasn't been replaced, or the partition deleted (both of which are quite common).
Click to expand...

The drive in it has had a head crash so no way to tell if it had the partition or not :)
I have the program to recreate the partition and configure the CMOS once I setup one of my tweeners to create the floppy. The self extracting archive wont run on my win 10 machine.
After replacing the battery I decided to give the mainboard and the backplane a bath so tomorrow I'll create the floppy and fire it up again once its fully dry.


Edit: I had to download a different version of setup/debug from the HP web site and have now created the debug partition on replacement hard drive. The machine is currently formatting a DOS partition on the drive.
So ultimately the machine needed a bath, new battery and hard drive. There was not a lot of dust in the machine to start with but what little there was must have been somewhere critical, since the bath is posts 100% reliably.
Its a pity I don't have a mounting kit for a CD/DVD drive but the machine looks like new so it was a good buy for $10
 
Last edited:
Quazbut said:
A creative mod with a strip of DIY bracket material got mine a DVD drive.

View attachment 44615View attachment 44616
Click to expand...
My solution was less elegant - I 'fitted' a CD-ROM drive by taping two bits of thick cardboard to the sides of the drive and ramming it into the drive bay - it's only held in place by friction. Once the case is on though it looks fine and works fine. Needing special mounting rails rather than just screws and using that proprietary 3.5" floppy drive instead of providing a standard 3.5" bay were not some of the better ideas Compaq had with their mid 90's PCs.
 
I have a few Compaq machines of that era (486 early Pentium) and luckily I found some drive rails for them over the years. I also have a bunch of those enlight mounting rails that were common in the 486 era and those green plastic DELL rails common in the P3 era (among others).
 
Bumping this thread in 2021. Apparently, HP has finally taken down the Compaq Softpaqs off their FTP site, which is a bummer.

This softpaq can be used on the Deskpro XL series, which does have upgrades into the Pentium and Pentium Pro line, see Modern Retro's video on this topic.

Anyone know where I can find SP16085.exe? I have the Configuration Utility, thankfully, found that here, but I can't find the corresponding version of the Diagnostics.
 
SteveHere said:
Bumping this thread in 2021. Apparently, HP has finally taken down the Compaq Softpaqs off their FTP site, which is a bummer.

This softpaq can be used on the Deskpro XL series, which does have upgrades into the Pentium and Pentium Pro line, see Modern Retro's video on this topic.

Anyone know where I can find SP16085.exe? I have the Configuration Utility, thankfully, found that here, but I can't find the corresponding version of the Diagnostics.
Click to expand...

I found it here:

http://cwcyrix.duckdns.org/ftp-archives/ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp16001-16500/

I little trick I do to find old files such as this if the name of the file is known. Use Google to do an index search like so:

intitle:"index of" SP16085.exe

More times than not I'll find someone on the net that stored the file somewhere. Of course make sure to scan for malware since these are unknown sources the files come from.

Many times I'll use the wayback machine to find the file(s) I need. Often though the links to the FTP servers are no longer valid. However, hovering over the download link reveals the actual name of the file I'm searching for. Take that name, along with an index search in Google, and Bob's you're uncle.
 
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