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I ahve a machine im working on for an older lady. I know its older than krap, but she wants to keep using it cause its small and good looking and all she does is e-mail letters. Hard drive crashed. How do I get into the BIOS? F1 F2 DEL nothing....
Its a Compaq Presario 2200 Desktop (Non-laptop model) 32 MB ram, 486 cyrix i think.
Thanks for any help. I posted here hopping someone has exp. with this machine....
I did but the first time i got nothing.... I got to tap it at just the right time. Now if i can get the windows 98 cd to boot ok. All i get is garbage on the screen from it along with a bunch of beeps.
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I don't know why you feel you need to enter the BIOS for a "crashed" HDD (whatever that means), but the key is F10. Start tapping it as soon as the COMPAQ splash screen comes up. Personally, I'd be booting off a Win98 boot floppy & then trying some DOS tricks.
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Disconnect the hard drive's data cable to keep it from interfering with the bootup and getting into the bios. There will probably be a LONG delay if the bios is set to the hard drive parameters rather than Auto detect.
When you try a key to get into the bios, tap it repeatedly, don't hold it down. You may need to start doing that just after the ram is counted if you see that right away when you boot or reboot, or just before or just after the Compaq logo screen appears if you see that right away when you boot or reboot, rather than starting immediately after booting or rebooting.
...It probably isn't a 486 system.
Some in Presario 2200 pentium desktop series have a Cyrix cpu equivalent to a pentium cpu rather than an Intel one.
Pictures here:
http://www.idhw.com/textual/guide/n...An example mboard here, but it's not the only possibility:
Compaq Presario 2200 Series - mboard info
http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/compaq/...If that is her mboard, it's a pentium mboard.
These early pentium mboards often had some onboard ram, as some 486 mboards often did.There are several possible other similar mboards in the 22xx series.
There used to be a QRG (specs) manual on the Compaq ftp site, which still exists, until fairly recently, but HP has butchered that site recently and it is no longer there. It is not a full manual, I was never able to find one, but it does have some settings and ram capacity and other info in it. If you would like that QRG, Presario2200_4200.pdf , I have it on my hard drive and could send it to you if you make a personal message to me.Look on the mboard for a stuck on label with the Compaq mboard spare part number - nine digits like this - xxxxxx-xxx
e.g. 292xxx-xxx
292536-001 for the actual 2200 seriesI was not able to determine the key you press to get into the bios in my research - it's often F1 or F10 on old Compaqs.
...When you do have the hard drive connected, it must spin and be recognized by the computer's bios; if it does and is, check her hard drive.
See the latter part of response 1 in this:
http://www.computing.net/windows95/...
....."All i get is garbage on the screen from it along with a bunch of beeps."
After Windows attempts to start, or starting when the computer is booted? Describe the beep pattern.
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thanks for you help. I was able to get 98 to install on the new hard drive using a boot disk. It would boot from cd but I'd get a bunch of weird looking lettering on the screen and just beep, beep, beep... fast. Other posts I'v read on this machine had this same problem.
Unfortinatlly the hard drive is bad... full of bad sectors. The smallest I ahve is a Seagate 40gig and I know the bios won't detect anything over a 8.4 gig. Does Seagate have a tools program with a DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) program?
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"Does Seagate have a tools program with a DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) program?"
Of course!
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/su...
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jam,
I went there and downloaded there 101MB program and made the boot cd and stuff... but i found no DDO. Do they offer an EZ-Bios? I have a WD disk with it but it won't worked cause its branded. All I can find online is people hateing EZ-Bios and wanting to remove it and here I am wanting it... lol.
Thanks.
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If you can't find what you need on seagate's site, do a google search for seagate dmgrdc.exe. Dmgrdc is a version of Disk manager for seagate drives and will install an overlay. It's what seagate used to include with new drives. Running it will create a bootable floppy disk that you use to set up the drive.
If you can't get a good download I can email you the file. It's only about 1 meg.
On one spyware site dmgrdc.exe was listed as malware. It's not, at least the one from seagate isn't.
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The major problem with using a DDO is you have to be very alert as to how you use bootable disks, especially those for operating systems - if you don't follow the right procedure you can lose access to or lose the contents of your DDO partition. I do not recommend using them for that reason, especially since add on PCI hard drive controller cards are now so cheap, if your computer bios is compatible with them.
You could use a modern PCI EIDE (a.k.a. PATA, P for parallel, as opposed to SATA, these days) hard drive controller card, connect the 40Gb drive to that, and have the bios on that card recognize the full size of the 40gb drive without you needing a DDO. They are available these days for as little as $30, or less. The only requirement is you must be able to select a SCSI or a hard drive controller card in the computer's bios boot order settings and place it first before other hard drives in order to boot from that drive.
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Tubes n Wires -
Can't use another controller. The 2200 has only one 8-bit ISA expansion slot which is used by the modem. Might be best to use a drive at partial capacity.
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"Can't use another controller. The 2200 has only one 8-bit ISA expansion slot which is used by the modem."
That depends on whether he is looking at an actual 2200 model or a 2200 series model, such as 2240. According to presario2200_4200.pdf, the actual 2200 model mboard has only one ISA slot, but some of the other possible mboards for a 2200 series computer have a shared PCI/ISA slot, and more ISA slots, like in the diagram at the second link response 5 .
"Might be best to use a drive at partial capacity."
Maybe, but that will probably severely limit the size seen on this computer, and would be a waste of a 40gb drive.
bigfoot2184 - Why don't you find her a used drive of a much smaller capacity that the bios will handle. She probably doesn't need much - even a 2gb one would do for Win 98SE in her case, and the bios may have an 8gb limit.
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DAVEINCAPS: if you don't mind... bigfoot2184@NOSPAMyahoo.com Remove the nospam part.
Tubesandwires: I would stick in a pci card if i had a slot. I ahve an 8 bit isa controller card but she needs the modem and I do not have an external modem for her. I can't find a small drive for nothing. Ebay is out of the question. I know how to use DDOs... I just don't have one for this brand drive as I use Western Digitals When possible.
Thanks everyone.
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"I ahve an 8 bit isa controller card..."
That's not a solution in any case, unless it's an actual enhanced IDE card that has it's own bios. A commonly available regular ISA IDE card will not get around the hard drive size recognition problem because it has no bios, you would probably have to disable the primary IDE on the mboard to be able to use it (probably has a fixed IRQ of 14 and a standard primary IDE I/O address), and it would probably run the hard drive a lot slower than the mboard IDE can.
"I can't find a small drive for nothing." Check local places that specialize in selling or have a lot of used computer parts. Or some computer repair places may have some lying around. They may not be free but are probably very cheap.
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hi have a presario 2200 use it outside at racetrack can not see screen is there away to make it brighter thank you
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