I need to put another HDD in my friends 486 ZDS. Problem - It does not show ANYTHING when it is booting up. I have tried all the keystrokes that normally work on other systems - nothing. Hers is only 120 megs. I have a gig I will put in for her if I can get the into it to change the HDD parameters. If you could - pleeeease help.

Historically it's been Insert...odd that it apparently doesn't work. You can probably get the system to tell you, though, if you take out the battery and boot the mobo without it. It's possible as well that the computer may be using a BIOS without an interactive setup utility. Quite a few Compaq systems used to do this, and if you wanted to change settings in the BIOS, you had to do so via either a setup floppy or a mounted setup partition on the hard disk.

Try popping the battery out.

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Thanks for your reply. I have tried insert and popping the battery out. What is "MOUNTED setup partition on harddrive". Also, will not boot from floppy, so is probably set in cmos to boot directly to HDD. Boy am I at a loss. I think they deliberately hid the cmos to keep people out. Thanks if you come up with anything else I'd appreciate all the help I can get.

Double post.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

The setup partition I was referring to is basically a small partition tucked away at the end of the hard disk containing software that lets you change settings in the BIOS. Usually it's about 1 MB or so in size. If the BIOS detects the partition on your drive when it boots, then it offers you the option to hit some key to boot into it. Compaq used this for a while as did some other vendors, I believe. But over 99% of them nowadays have the setup program actually written inside the BIOS so that no extra hard disk space is required to effect settings in the BIOS.

Also, I suppose you've also fiddled with the Clear CMOS jumper already too, right?

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"And knowing is half the battle!"