if anyone happens on this in the future....

Presario 3060 needs the following from ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/
sp2141.exe and sp10245.exe

I've never seen a bios with a sector size setting. Anything new enough to cope with 4K sectors would be able to auto-detect.
All old hard drives use 512 byte sectors, and so do all SD cards.

Didn't pressing F10 on start up work at all on the original hdd? Some one here would've pointed you to that archive as a few of us here Compaqs of various ages, shapes and sizes. Have use prepared the replacement device or booting afresh with out partitioning(& setting it ti active) or formating? If the replacement drive is within the bios detection range it should pick it up after a cold boot and display something has changed on the system then ask to press F1 to save those changes then it will reboot.

Similar to this but in this case my cmos battery is dead.

Try using a boot floppy to partition and format the drive or a linux live distro to see if it detects the drive do the hdd set up routine with that.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Didn't pressing F10 on start up work at all on the original hdd? Some one here would've pointed you to that archive as a few of […]
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Didn't pressing F10 on start up work at all on the original hdd? Some one here would've pointed you to that archive as a few of us here Compaqs of various ages, shapes and sizes. Have use prepared the replacement device or booting afresh with out partitioning(& setting it ti active) or formating? If the replacement drive is within the bios detection range it should pick it up after a cold boot and display something has changed on the system then ask to press F1 to save those changes then it will reboot.

20190905_154614.jpg

Similar to this but in this case my cmos battery is dead.

Try using a boot floppy to partition and format the drive or a linux live distro to see if it detects the drive do the hdd set up routine with that.

The drive that came with this was a single partition with dos and nothing else on it, f10 didn't bring anything up. I do get the prompt to save and continue with f1 when changing hard disks, but every disk I put it aside from the fireball gets set as the type 65 and trying to format the drive after booting from a floppy always comes back with being unable to create a partition as there is no space on the drive but it can read that there is a fat32 partition on it. This was with a 2gb, 8gb, 64gb SD card, 240gb ssd, and with a 60gb hdd. Same behavior on all. After I matched the type 65 drive settings to the actual counts on the drive I'm using I'm still getting a drive error f1 to continue but I was able to start a windows install instead of getting a no fixed disks error, but the install has errors in scandisk then fails with crazy beeping and garbage characters.

The reason I was thinking some sector size setting is when I change the cylinder/head/sector counts the bios shows me a drive size in MB that is way smaller then the drive I'm using. I've never dealt a system like this though.

Using the 2gig drive in another system. Try partitioning it then set that to active using fdisk. Then format and sys c: (format /s C:) using a win95b/c or win98 boot disk. Another option is grabbing the China Dos Unions two disk Dos 7.1 distro from Winworldpc.com and try installing that. You really only need disk one to get the essential files. Make sure it boots to the Dos prompt then fit the hard drive in the Compaq and see if the will boot to C: after you get that config error message.

Good luck.

Thanks I'll give that a shot tonight

Compaq systems are really no different in the way they are set up than most x86 systems apart from the set up utility which can be set up on a small hidden partition if you wanted. It's not compulsory at all.