Subj : HP fun and games To : MARTIN ATKINS From : Roy J. Tellason Date : Thu May 19 2005 09:06 pm MARTIN ATKINS wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON: -=> ROY J. TELLASON wrote to ALL <=- RJT> So I got this kinda nice HP machine, and I'm trying to see where I can RJT> go with it... RJT> It's only got 64M of ram in it, a 10G HD, and when you power it up RJT> there's the option to run some diagnostics, which are apparently RJT> installed on the HD in a small separate partition. MA> You say apparently. If it has it's own partition you should be able MA> to see it. Well, yeah. MA> I could be called from the MBR but more than likely it is a kernel MA> call by the HP installation disk. I don't understand what you're saying here. RJT> I want to put more ram in there, lose the 98 install, and put a RJT> somewhat smaller HD in it to use the box as a workstation. I'd like to RJT> be able to keep those diagnostics if I can. MA> I think if you loss the win98 install you will loss the tools. So it appears. RJT> At first I thought it'd be easy enough to copy that smallish partition RJT> over to another drive, but I'm not sure about how I'd get it to _boot_ RJT> into that the way it does now. MA> What about you junk as much of the win98 as is practically possible MA> and see how small you can get it. Then use something like "fips" to MA> shrink the partition. That will give you something which is easily MA> movable with XXCOPY. XXCOPY the entire setup over to another disk MA> and make it bootable with "fdisk /mbr". If the xcopied disk boots MA> with the tools then the tools are not being called from the MBR. This doesn't make sense. How is something going to boot and _not_ be called from the MBR? I thought about doing an fdisk /mbr, but that just writes the boot code from that particular copy of fdisk, apparently, so I'd have to use the w98 version of it. And I know of no way to tell it to write the MBR on a second drive, offhand. I'm *really* not into wasting the time screwing around with that copy of 98 anyhow. MA> This means it's save to move it off the 10gig as you have it on the MA> other disk. I did copy that smallish partition over to the other HD, using dd. Couldn't get it to work, though. I finally gave up on the idea as a waste of time and wiped it, re-doing my partitions. RJT> So last night I start poking around on HP's web site, and I found the RJT> stuff for that model machine ("Brio BA210"). I thought I was on to RJT> something when I saw "OS Independent" but that link pointed to a 2M+ RJT> ".exe" file. Which file, when I try to run it on this box, says RJT> "Cannot be run in DOS mode". WTF? So I looked some more, and the RJT> next logical choice seems to be getting the software for "DOS". Only RJT> thing is, that's a 159MB ISO file! No way am I gonna download that RJT> without being sure that it's what I'd need to make this work... MA> Im not sure about all this but it looks like you have a vendor MA> installation so it may be specific to the machine it was installed MA> on. What ever these tools are i don't see what a proper instalation MA> of 98 won't be able to do if you have the hardware drivers. Yeah, well, I don't tend to think of using 98 for "tools", not when I have so much better in the way of tools around in other platforms. MA> Anyway if they tickle your fancy you can always build around the MA> shrunken partition with a boot loader. It is not an ideal solution MA> but you can always use the tools by booting to the vendor install. MA> On the upside it does give you more time to see if the tools can be MA> separated from the system. The original drive is now out, sitting here on my desk. I have other drives that I'm going to use first, but it's really not that big of a deal to me at this point to salvage that stuff. I do have that downloaded file to install that stuff, maybe I'll have a go at playing with it on the one 98 box here (also a Compaq as it turns out), but it's not real high up on my list... RJT> Any of you guys have suggestions as to how I might make this work? MA> I've used xxcopy on a WIN/ME and it went without a hickup. If you MA> can transport the opperating/partition around you can clone it to a MA> slave and have the boot loader select it if you need to probe MA> hardware. I suspect that I could also have messed around with LILO to get that diagnostic partition to boot. If I get to it before wiping that drive perhaps I can get there, but I have an awful lot of stuff to do here besides, so at this point in time I'm not terribly worried about it. I *did* run all of those diagnostics first, when I found them, and everything seems to be working just fine. :-) --- * Origin: TANSTAAFL BBS 717-838-8539 (1:270/615) .