I assisted Jerry in resolving this problem.  The issue was not a BIOS
problem, it was a Quick Restore from Compaq problem.

George's post is incorrect in a couple of ways.

First off BIOS earlier than January 1997 generally have no problems
with larger than 2 GB drives.  That usually is an issue with a BIOS
older than say 1994 or 1995.  Anyone with an EIDE aka FAST ATA
controller card should be able to work with these drives.  I am sure
there are exceptions.

Second, FDISK under 6.22 or 7.0 should let you partition the drive
with no problem.

Third, you cannot get Win95 OSR2, unless you buy a very new system or
you subscribe to MSDN.  Even if you have OSR2, it is not recommended
that you load it on an older system.

Fourth, Windows NT would do the trick, however I would not load NT on
a Presario.  These machines are home computer with tons of "junk" in
them.  NT would probably have a problem with some of the stuff.

Finally, I am not sure if there is such a thing as someone having too
much money, but I definitely do not believe that I could, or would
want to, be the judge of such a thing.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
Hicomp America, Inc.
[log in to unmask]        www.hicomp.com/hicomp
(800) 323-8863   (281) 288-7438  fax: (281) 355-6879



-----Original Message-----
From:   George Fetters [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Thursday, April 24, 1997 5:43 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Fwd:Off-Topic: Compaq Pasario

Receintly we added 5.1 gig drives to our HP Vectra 6/150's and had a
similar
problem.  The problem stems from the fact that most bios versions
prior to
January 1997 are unable to recognize drives greater than 2 gig and the
16bit FAT
table set up by dos or windows 95 can't handle drives bigger than 2
gig.
(Automagic Problem) ;')

Your Options.

1. There should be partition software from the maker of the Hard Drive
to allow
you to partition the drive into 2 or more partitions and put your
software back
on.

2. Get Windows 95 OSR2(OEM Service Release 2) which has the ability to
format a
drive using a 32bit FAT table.

3. Get Windows NT which can do the same with NTFS.

I suggest the first, Bill Gates has too much money already.


____________________Forward Header_____________________
Subject:    Off-Topic: Compaq Pasario
Author: Jerry Fochtman <[log in to unmask]>
Date:       4/24/97 6:12 AM

/Note:  If you're not familiar with Compaq's Pasario line you may want
to
 stop reading and circular-file this message now.
<snipped>
So we placed the 3.1 WD in it and the auto-config logic which Compaq
seems to
have to setup BIOS apparently doesn't have a corresponding drive type
in its
table, but went ahead and set it up as what appears to be a 2.1 GB
unit.  So
we went ahead to see if we could proceed anyway to at least get the
system
back up.

Unfortunately the 'QuickRestore' tool, to rebuild the drive and load
all the
software from CD aborted with:

         "Fatal Error 1: Image Builder Error. BPB: too big for FAT"