The bios should be in rom. You can check by just unplugging the hdd and turning it on

Violett'Blossom wrote:

I found one of those pc's with all original peripherals for 30 USD, Iam however not sure if I can install new OS on it, I have heard that some of those Compaq computers does not have bios in rom but on the hard drive, so Iam not sure about this model.

Any help is hugely appreciated 😊

Compaq had a different way of setting up their computers that has its ups and downs.

On the up-side:
The BIOS interface of a Compaq computer was years ahead of the competition with GUI that resembled Windows, with full-colour high resolution icons and menus with mouse support.

On the down-side:
Because the aforementioned setup applications could not actually fit into the ROM of the computer, it was usually stored on a separate partition on the computer's hard-disk or a floppy that came with the system. Only the actual settings were stored on the mainboard. This means that if your hard-disk died, or you lost the floppy - there wasn't much you could do to configure the BIOS!

If yours is a system with a separate BIOS setup utility, you have to go hunting for it. Hopefully Hewlett Packard (which bought Compaq) has mirrored all their original support files...

Afair the Deskpro 2000/4000/6000 had usual on chip BIOS. Got half a dozen of these in my basement. In case you are looking for the on disk Setup and diagnostics, its still availiable on the ftp server. ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/allfiles.txt is a list of many, but not all availiable files.