compaq proprietary bios - can't boot

master of disaster

hello there

I set up gentoo with development-sources 2.6.7 on a compaq presario 7461 - everything went very well, no problems at all till I wanted to reboot

the compaq bios (for the camaro motherboard built on via mvp4 chipset) is checking for some proprietary compaq software which is (with this preinstalled machines) installed at the end of the harddisk ... if it can't find it the reboot starts again ... and again ..

unluckily, I didn't know that when I decided to set up a little gentoo server on this machine :lol:

grub starts but after selecting the kernel the system doesn't boot but simply falls back ... the compaq screen shows up for a few moments and then it reboots again ... and again ... :twisted:

via doesn't care for bios update because they only provided the chipset and compaq isn't interested in providing a bios update at all ...

One thing I have in mind is making my own boot-cd with the kernel I compiled for this machine. but I've never done this before and I'm not really sure if it would help to solve the problem ... I wouldn't care to start from disk ... any help to this would be greatly appreciated because I don't even know where to start!!

I already tried some other things like this nobiospnp option in grub (read somewhere about that where the problem seemed to be similar) but it didn't help at all ...
the bios itself doesn't seem to provide a possible solution ... it's just not possible to change a lot there ...

it would be great if someone has an idea how I could get around this compaq shit

any help would be appreciated ...

thanks
Marcel

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2004 7:27 pm Post subject:

master of disaster,

Since grub starts, your problem is not BIOS related. Not even the hidden stuff on the HDD. If it was BIOS, grub would not run at all.

You either have a kernel install problem or a grub.conf problem (or both).

Please post the content of /boot/grub.conf and the result of

mr sk · Apprentice Joined: 15 Jul 2004 Posts: 174 Location: Hollis

Are you dual boooting? Did you wipe your drive via fdisk, partitions and all?

It doesnt seem like BIOS, since it boots to GRUB.

master of disaster · Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 6:31 am Post subject:

hello and thanks for your quick answers!

sounds logical - if it were a bios problem grub shouldn't load at all ...
I'm not dual-booting. it's and old machine which I intended to use as a server ...

ls /boot gives:

master of disaster · Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 9:53 am Post subject:

suppose I might have found the problem :roll:

played around with make.conf ...
had i586 instead of i686!

what do I have to rebuild to fix this mistake?
reemerged the kernel ...
recompiled the kernel ...
reemerged grub ...

will see if it works in a few minutes ...

xef · Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 10:43 am Post subject:

I think that there is no problem running a i586 kernel in a i686 cpu...

Maby some other kernel option, like smp active when you only have one cpu...

master of disaster · Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 11:50 am Post subject:

YIPPEIAE

it's up and running!

I don't know if i586/i686 was a problem ... maybe you're right xef ...

but anyway I chose the wrong processor family (!!!) ... and suspected the problem to be with this compaq shit because I already had problems with compaq before!!

anyway thanks a lot to everybody who answered to my cry for help!

@NeddySeagoon: many thanks to you! I was already thinking about throwing this bloody machine out of the window

just didn't realize that the problem lies somewhere else!