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Compaq Armada 1700 - old BIOS version

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First post, by manawyrm

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Hi,

I'm looking for an old BIOS version for the Compaq Armada 1700 laptop.
Mine is currently running the newest System ROMPaq 686EM_99.1130 A (sp12835.exe), which unfortunately seems to be buggy.
FAT16/BIOS mode FS accesses get corrupted on a lot of drives (I've tested mSATA SSDs, CF cards, etc.).
Just doing normal stuff like "edit CONFIG.SYS" just gives corrupt data.

This didn't happen with the older BIOS version which I had previously (but stupidly didn't save).

Thanks for any help!

Tobias

Reply 1 of 4, by manawyrm

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So, for anyone looking into the Compaq Armada 1700 as well...
Updating the BIOS to the newest version seems to have enabled DMA for real-mode accesses via the BIOS routines. There doesn't seem to be any way of disabling DMA.
The cheap CF adapters (like mine) don't pass the required DMA lines, which causes the system to boot, but fail on any reads larger than a single sector.

Either fix those adapters or use an SATA->IDE adapter instead.

Reply 2 of 4, by Horun

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Good info ! Looked around for older Armada 1700 bios than sp12835.exe and found a few.
SP12835.txt says: SUPERSEDES: SP10866 (ROM dated 06/04/99)
SP10866 says: SUPERSEDES: SP10226 (14 May 1999)
SP10226 says: SUPERSEDES: SP9331 (31 December 1998)
SP9331 says: SUPERSEDES: SP8391 (09 September 1998)
and SP8391 says: SUPERSEDES: SP7172 (08 June 1998)
you can find those here: https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.compaq. … om/pub/softpaq/ or here: http://cwcyrix.duckdns.org/ftp-archives/ftp.c … om/pub/softpaq/
I have had better luck at https://ftp.zx.net.nz/ at downloading...
Good luck

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 4 of 4, by Horun

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Great ! Let us know if you can "back flash" the board to previous BIOS if you do try it.

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

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