TrevorS
01-12-2005, 04:25 AM
Hi,
I was given an old Presario 7478 in pieces, and put it back together again. The memory, CMOS battery, hard drive, and PC cards were gone, the jumpers were wrong, and the K6-2/533 processor didn't seem healthy (had been jumpered for 2.8V), so I rebuilt it with a known good K6-2/550, an available 64MB PC133 SDRAM, 6.3GB ATA-33 WD and the original PHILLIPS CDD4401/71 CD-Drive. I set the jumpers for 2.2V CPU, 100MHz FSB, and 5.5 multiplier. It has a Camaro board which I understand is actually a Mitac 5114vu, except with three SDRAM slots. I downloaded the manuals from both manufacturers and see the chip set is the MVP4 Apollo, the successor to my FIC VA-503+ MVP3 which runs WinXP just fine.
(I'm using an IOGear MiniView 4-port KVM with the Compaq and if it's selected during Win98SE boot, the mouse isn't detected. The other three PC's on the switch have no problem - they are running WinXP.)
According to Mitac the outside IDE port is the secondary, whereas Compaq says it's the primary. (I get the impression Compaq screwed around with the BIOS to make the board both abnormal and unique.)
I went with Mitac and placed both hard drive (master) and CD-Drive (slave) on the inside port (reports as drives 1 and 2 -- Mitac must be right). Win 98SE installs and runs fine. However, when I try to install WinXP, after it finishes going through the motions of formatting the drive (either FAT32 or NTFS) it reports it was unable to do so and says the drive is probably defective (it isn't). It did this regardless of which IDE port I tried. I finally tried first formating FAT32 via a Win98 start diskette and then skipping the WinXP format in Setup, that worked.
At the initial Windows boot during WinXP install, the KVM mouse was again missed (again with console selected) but install proceeded pretty much without incident from there (seemed like the CD-Drive may have timed out two or three times -- had to power the PC down and up at displayed "19 minutes remaining" to recover from what appeared to be a permanent stall.)
1) I'm wondering if it's possible to install a Mitac BIOS in the board and get away from the Compaq encapsulation -- turn it back into a normal mainboard.
2) I'm also wondering why WinXP setup can't format the hard drive, whereas it can install the operating system, and whereas Win98SE can do both.
3) I'm further wondering why the mouse isn't detected when selected by the KVM console during Win98SE boot (and the initial WinXP boot during install).
4) I'm additionally wondering about the seemingly very occasional CD-Drive timeouts --a behavior I never saw during Win98SE install.
5) I'm finally wondering when my new 128MB PC133 SDRAM and LAN card are going to arrive so that it can become a "real" computer (Chuckle, chuckle!) :)
Fortunately, the KVM console mouse IS detected properly during a normal WinXP boot (unlike during a Win98SE boot) and the install did eventually complete successfully (I think -- time will tell).
Any ideas on my four items ??? Thanks -- Trevor
I was given an old Presario 7478 in pieces, and put it back together again. The memory, CMOS battery, hard drive, and PC cards were gone, the jumpers were wrong, and the K6-2/533 processor didn't seem healthy (had been jumpered for 2.8V), so I rebuilt it with a known good K6-2/550, an available 64MB PC133 SDRAM, 6.3GB ATA-33 WD and the original PHILLIPS CDD4401/71 CD-Drive. I set the jumpers for 2.2V CPU, 100MHz FSB, and 5.5 multiplier. It has a Camaro board which I understand is actually a Mitac 5114vu, except with three SDRAM slots. I downloaded the manuals from both manufacturers and see the chip set is the MVP4 Apollo, the successor to my FIC VA-503+ MVP3 which runs WinXP just fine.
(I'm using an IOGear MiniView 4-port KVM with the Compaq and if it's selected during Win98SE boot, the mouse isn't detected. The other three PC's on the switch have no problem - they are running WinXP.)
According to Mitac the outside IDE port is the secondary, whereas Compaq says it's the primary. (I get the impression Compaq screwed around with the BIOS to make the board both abnormal and unique.)
I went with Mitac and placed both hard drive (master) and CD-Drive (slave) on the inside port (reports as drives 1 and 2 -- Mitac must be right). Win 98SE installs and runs fine. However, when I try to install WinXP, after it finishes going through the motions of formatting the drive (either FAT32 or NTFS) it reports it was unable to do so and says the drive is probably defective (it isn't). It did this regardless of which IDE port I tried. I finally tried first formating FAT32 via a Win98 start diskette and then skipping the WinXP format in Setup, that worked.
At the initial Windows boot during WinXP install, the KVM mouse was again missed (again with console selected) but install proceeded pretty much without incident from there (seemed like the CD-Drive may have timed out two or three times -- had to power the PC down and up at displayed "19 minutes remaining" to recover from what appeared to be a permanent stall.)
1) I'm wondering if it's possible to install a Mitac BIOS in the board and get away from the Compaq encapsulation -- turn it back into a normal mainboard.
2) I'm also wondering why WinXP setup can't format the hard drive, whereas it can install the operating system, and whereas Win98SE can do both.
3) I'm further wondering why the mouse isn't detected when selected by the KVM console during Win98SE boot (and the initial WinXP boot during install).
4) I'm additionally wondering about the seemingly very occasional CD-Drive timeouts --a behavior I never saw during Win98SE install.
5) I'm finally wondering when my new 128MB PC133 SDRAM and LAN card are going to arrive so that it can become a "real" computer (Chuckle, chuckle!) :)
Fortunately, the KVM console mouse IS detected properly during a normal WinXP boot (unlike during a Win98SE boot) and the install did eventually complete successfully (I think -- time will tell).
Any ideas on my four items ??? Thanks -- Trevor