VOGONS


First post, by b0by007

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Hello people.
I opened up my Compaq Deskpro EN SFF to clean the dust inside.
After that, the hdd wasnt detected anymore, and when I entered bios, the pc froze while I entered the bios and looking, in bios, for ide devices.
I replaced the hdd with a known good working one, and it was the same. Then I resitted the ide and molex cables, and the new hdd is detected again. Probably the cables were not making good contact.
BUT, now I get at Compaq splash screen some corrupted charectors, like in that picture.
The pc works well with Windows 98. I played, for a few hours, Tomb Raider 2, Quake 1, Heretic 2, Quake 2, NFS 3, Motoracer 2. No coruppted textures or anything strange.
I tested even Quake 3, at very low resolution and crapy low textures, and is stills get 14 fps. Is working, not playable. But that is just the limitation of the ATI 3d RAGE PRO.

Has anyone encountered this corrupted charectors in bios splash screen? Should I be worried? I found a Bios for this compaq variant 686T5. Should I try to reflash the bios?

HP Vectra D2753A 486/25N i486 SX 25mhz
UNISYS SG3500 AMD486 DX2 66mhz
OLIVETTI M4 i486 SX2 50mhz
IBM PC 330 6577-79T, Pentium 166mhz
IBM PC 300GL 6561-350, Pentium II MMX 266mhz
My retro youtube channel!

Reply 1 of 4, by debs3759

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Flashing (or reflashing) the BIOS would be the first thing I'd try. After that, if necessary, the next thing I would check would be the RAM. Long time since I worked with any of my retro hardware though, so I may have missed something obvious.

See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.

Reply 2 of 4, by Robbbert

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Look at the RAM first. Unplug the sticks, clean the connections, and then plug them back in firmly. You'll probably find the problem has then gone away.

Reply 3 of 4, by andrea

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It looks like gibberish in the Ownership tag.
In the BIOS, try going in Security -> System IDs and clear out the Enter Ownership Tag field.

Reply 4 of 4, by b0by007

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Many thanks to all that replied. It was the Owenership tag.
I placed a short name of the system and now looks cool.
I really like playing with this tiny machine and I was worried is starting to broke.

HP Vectra D2753A 486/25N i486 SX 25mhz
UNISYS SG3500 AMD486 DX2 66mhz
OLIVETTI M4 i486 SX2 50mhz
IBM PC 330 6577-79T, Pentium 166mhz
IBM PC 300GL 6561-350, Pentium II MMX 266mhz
My retro youtube channel!