Compaq Armada 7800 bios access ?

[Externet]

Hi.
Replaced its very dead hard drive with a new blank one and cannot access bios.
At powerup, only pressing "Fn Esc" shows a small detail on screen but unable to change settings. F10 does not work.

The web has been of no help, seen many comments and forums on the subject with no real light.
The HP site has the subject archived but the link does not work when clicking on it.

Clues please? Am trying to install Linux on that laptop.

Miguel

[CeaSaR]

Have you tried Yahoo! Search? Try this particular one (>link<).

Came up with a couple possibilities:

Computing.net: (>link<)
Tom's Hardware: (>link<)
Fixya.com: (>link<)

And a bunch of others there. Hope one of them helps.

CeaSaR

[reloadron]

Hi Ya Miguel

OK, I may be way off base on this or it may help. That laptop is about 10 or 11 years old. Compaq had a screwey system at the time where a few BIOS utilities were in a hidden small partition on the HDD. Since the original HDD is toast you won't have those BIOS utilities available.

Does the laptop have a floppy drive as some did and some didn't in that series you have? If it has a floppy you may be able to download and create a Windows 98 boot disk. That would afford you the opportunity to boot from a floppy and format your new drive in FAT32.

Lacking a floppy the system should default to boot from the old CD ROM drive. What distro of Linux and if you have a bootable Linux CD (Maybe Linux Live) what happens if you place the CD in and try to boot from it? Most Linux distros are downloaded as an ISO file and need to be made into a bootable CD.

Ron