Linux on Compaq Deskpro EN
 

Trying to install Linux RedHat 9 or Mandrake 9.2 on a Compaq DeskPro EN.
The issue is ; the BIOS won't recognize the correct hard drive Cylinders,Heads and Sectors.

The hard drive is a Seagate ST315310A 15GB

Tried updating to the lastest BIOS version but to no avail.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks

This may be something you have already thought of. How old is the drive? I have had this a bit with some of the old ebay machines I have fixed up for friends. I have only ever lost a good part of a gig at the most and have always put it down to bad sectors.

I had one 40GB hard drive that I bought new and it's sectors were a little different but I didnt even call the shop and complain cus I just thought it was like having a little blemmish on a big bit of fruit. Although I only lost 200 MB in that deal. Some hdds I have installed on peoples machines have actually been up to a GB bigger than they were supposed to be.

How much space are you losing? Is it like I am suggesting or is it more like a huge chunk is lost?

For a quick test you might boot up with a couple of different live CDs and see what they find.

That's about the extent of what I can suggest.

I used to have one of these machines a few years ago.

Hehe Boris, I still got one! Its my file/web/print server



If it is down to bad sectors, I can recommend a very good program that can nearly always repair/recover them down to the last few bytes of data. The program is called SpinRite and you can find out about it at grc.com It can be made into a bootable floppy/cd/flash drive and then you can set it to scan your drive (works on most file systems - linux,fat,ntfs and more) and if it finds bad sectors it recovers them to the last few bytes.

I have used this program on many computers that didnt boot due to hard drive problems and it has fixed them all. So if that could be your problem give SpinRite a try.