[clue-tech] Compaq Armada 3500

[Bill Smith]

I took this to the installfest in hopes of getting it fixed. Thanks again to Jon and David A. for spending so much time on it. A little history, the original drive that was in it is a 4 gig IBM Travelstar. I installed Debian on it for a class about Linux some time ago, and I think that was the original hdd in this computer.  Without any problems. I recently purchased a 20 gig Hitachi Travelstar used. The shop I bought it from ran a recert test and it passed. The 20 g is supposed to be the largest the BIOS will recognize, and that seems to be the case. I have run OEM software, "drive fitness testing" and "feature tool" without significant problems. At the installfest we decided we needed to run fdisk on the 20 g because it would not boot and gave me a "non system disk or disk error" when we tried to boot. The newest Debian seems to install correctly, and recognized the hdd as a 20 g, it even downloaded and installed some software specific to laptops. I ran fdisk from an old Win 98 SE install cd as it seemed to be the most contemporary software I had, then reinstalled the latest v. of Debian. I'm getting the same error. As I understand it fdisk is supposed to rewrite the MBR and check the drive, it did whatever without errors.
The odd thing about this box is that there is supposed to be a "Diagnostics Partition" at the begining of the HDD, David built me a CD with the HP tools to do this and it would not create the partition, even after fdisk was run. I have the instructions from the HP forum to create it and the tools now as well. The CD seems to worki flawlessly as I was able to access the BIOS and make and save a change and then change it back, (memory test then back to quick boot). I tried to run a low level format of the hdd with the OEM tools and it told me the drive was not a Hitachi drive, some problem there.
I think there is some sort of problem with the MBR on the 20 g, but I have not been able to find it, at one point, while trying to access the BIOS (pressing F10) I got the grub loading please wait then it hung at grub error 25, that was several reinstalls ago, and I have not been able to reproduce it since.
Sorry for the long post but I'm stumped. Bill Smith 		 	   		  
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