[clue-tech] Compaq Armada 3500

[Russell Glissmann]

If you want to change the MBR, you can again use the Win 98 FDisk with the
command: fdisk /mbr.  This will only correct the MBR back to a "normal" mbr.
 Usually I've used this when getting rid of lilo, but it may help in this
situation as well.

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 9:50 AM, Bill Smith <wpsmithii at msn.com> wrote:

>  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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