| I just got a compaq IA-1 MSN companion. This must be a little different than the emachines one. Mine has an AMD k6 266Mhz in a ZIF socket and a cyberblade graphics chip. Out of the box, you can't get into the bios. Opening it up was a little scary. Yes, you have to take off the grey metal shield above the mobo to get at the bios reset jumper. It's right next to the CF slot on the top side of the board. After you take off all the screws that hold the grey shield on, it still wont come off. That giant aluminum heat sink is glued to the uproc. When I first pulled it off there was a big >snap< and I almost crapped my pants, but nothing was damaged. Maybe twisting it a little as you pull will make it come off easier. With that thing off, you can get to the jumper pins. Put the jumper on the other pins, power up, there will be some wierd junk on the screen, then power down. Put the jumper back the way it was and power up again. Now you need to hold down the "compaq" key on the keyboard as it boots up (says "Compaq" in big red letters on the screen). Bang, you should be dumped into the bios config screen. I think the cancel key with the little hand on it is really the esc key, and the other special function keys are mapped to the function keys. Thats as far as I've gotten so far. I guess I need to get a 16MB flash card and get jailbait on it somehow.
I have been thinking about making a connector that goes from the cf slot to an IDE socket so I can use a laptop HD instead of a microdrive. Nobody seems to make one specifically for this purpose. Anybody else ever heard of such a thing? I got a couple of Molex CF headers that I think I'll try to wire up by hand, but those are some tiny leads.
So how have you guys gotten it to boot up on USB? will the BIOS automagically recognize the usb zip drive and boot up, or do you have to load some linux first to support the USB? In my IA-1 BIOS, I can select the boot order to be floppy (?) or HD (?) but I haven't figured out if this translates into "CF slot" and "flashdisk" or if it will go look for USB devices. I might have to beg/borrow/steal a usb zip drive.
bloop_9 | |
