Cga.8086 wrote on 2020-04-22, 17:36:

Hi all […]
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Hi all

I have an old pentium 120mhz system that is a compaq presario. The computer was given to me with wintows98 but im sure it was formated because none of the compaq tools and themes were found on the hard drive. from what i have been reading, Compaq implemented something called BOMID... written to the UIA area of the hard disk. And they also provided quick restore discs for their machines. The quick restore discs in win95 era needed to be booted with a floppy disk i belive, it was DOS based, and it asked you to enter the Serial number, located on a sticker on the back of the pc case.

but here are many doubts i have, maybe someone can explain:

1) Does anyone know what BOMID is?
2) Is it another partition on the HDD drive , or the BOMID is in some part of the hard drive that is not accessible with regular use?
3) If i have an original Hard drive from compaq that was formated, how can i retreive the BOMID? or BOMID was lost with a format?
4) What happens if you put a brand new hard disk (that is not compaq) without BOMID? can you use a quick restore CD? Or quick restore reads the BOMID?

The BOMID is a number that depends on your compaq specific model: http://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/archive/Compaq/bomid.html and it's stored on a file in the hard drive of the compaq machines. Some more information here: https://community.hpe.com/t5/disk/bomid-numbe … 29#.XqCeY3VKhhE