Such a fun coincidence that this thread popped up today!

I just made a few upgrades/sidegrades tonight 😀

Graphics card is changed to a Compaq Qvision 1024/e
Network card is changed to 3com 579 EISA

It needs a complete reinstallation and then its going to be my 1992-office computer for Excel experiments. More on that later 😀

I recommend using an Adaptec 2740W or Adaptec 2742W for SCSI stuff up to ~18 MB/s.
There are some EISA network cards with 100 MBit/s but they were a disappointment for me.

About this Compaq Prosignia I recommend some other threads from mkarcher (alias karcherm):
Announcement: 3D printable model for Compaq Prosignia 3.5" drive bays.
And if you plan to use a DX2 or more modern non-Pentium CPU that supports the CPUID instruction and to play with Windows NT 3.1, read this:
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/ques … -486dx4-machine
...because you might have got a DX2 with CPUID instruction.

Disruptor wrote on 2025-04-20, 22:09:

I recommend using an Adaptec 2740W or Adaptec 2742W for SCSI stuff up to ~18 MB/s. There are some EISA network cards with 100 MB […]
Show full quote

I recommend using an Adaptec 2740W or Adaptec 2742W for SCSI stuff up to ~18 MB/s.
There are some EISA network cards with 100 MBit/s but they were a disappointment for me.

About this Compaq Prosignia I recommend some other threads from mkarcher (alias karcherm):
Announcement: 3D printable model for Compaq Prosignia 3.5" drive bays.
And if you plan to use a DX2 or more modern non-Pentium CPU that supports the CPUID instruction and to play with Windows NT 3.1, read this:
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/ques … -486dx4-machine
...because you might have got a DX2 with CPUID instruction.

I have to go thru my pile of scsi-cards because I'm quite sure that I have an EISA card from Adaptec, it might be better then what I have on the motherboard.

The computer came with 3-4 sets of drive rails so I can load it full with drives if I want to 😀

Thanks for the heads up on NT 3.1. I can always downgrade to a DX33 again if needed.

Not every DX2-66 has CPUID instruction.
The older ones don't have it.
But a DX-33 runs without heatsink/cooler.

I did find the SCSI card I was looking for. This is an Adaptec 2742AT so its not the version with 68 pin wide scsi.... but still probably a bit better then the onboard controller. With some luck it accepts a 36gb drive or if I can find something smaller. I dont need the space but the noise (bad bearings) from the 1gb drive I have now is horrible!

OSkar000 wrote on 2025-04-22, 20:37:

I did find the SCSI card I was looking for. This is an Adaptec 2742AT so its not the version with 68 pin wide scsi.... but still probably a bit better then the onboard controller. With some luck it accepts a 36gb drive or if I can find something smaller. I dont need the space but the noise (bad bearings) from the 1gb drive I have now is horrible!

You need no luck.
You just need Vogons.
mkarcher has developed a patch for that kind of controllers. Limit should be 2 TB then, as I already have tested.
Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Disruptor wrote on 2025-04-22, 20:50:

You need no luck. You just need Vogons. mkarcher has developed a patch for that kind of controllers. Limit should be 2 TB then, […]
Show full quote

OSkar000 wrote on 2025-04-22, 20:37:

I did find the SCSI card I was looking for. This is an Adaptec 2742AT so its not the version with 68 pin wide scsi.... but still probably a bit better then the onboard controller. With some luck it accepts a 36gb drive or if I can find something smaller. I dont need the space but the noise (bad bearings) from the 1gb drive I have now is horrible!

You need no luck.
You just need Vogons.
mkarcher has developed a patch for that kind of controllers. Limit should be 2 TB then, as I already have tested.
Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

I remember that thread! Didnt think of it when I found the card... but that solves a lot of problems and creates a few new pleasant problems 😀

And programming a new Eprom shouldnt be that hard. I got my father to help me when upgrading the bios on an older Adaptec card, could have been a 1542CP

mkarcher wrote on 2025-04-20, 06:51:

reodraca wrote on 2025-04-20, 06:43:

Anyone here know why the System Configuration Utility fails to save the config to the hard drive on my Prosignia 3081? Dallas RTC battery keeps time and date just fine and the SCSI hard drives are both formatted and bootable.

I expect you have the System Configuration Utility installed in the System Configuration Partition at the start of your hard drive, as expected by Compaq, and you are booting it using the F10 hotkey. That's the intended way of running the SCU from hard drive. I can't remember I ever had issues saving the configuration, so I suspect issues with your system partition. As that partition is just a standard FAT partition, albeit with a dedicated "type number" in the partition table, you can try to edit that type to FAT16, and then run chkdsk or any other validation tool on it. You might also check for write-protection on SYSTEM.CHL (or however the file is config file is called).

What error message do you get when you try to save the configuration?

I managed to resolve this in another thread, but thanks! Here's what happened: I received this computer with a fully formatted hard drive and an error 162 config not set. I used the 4-disk floppy set of the Compaq System Config Utility to configure the hardware, and it would not save to the bios or the hard drive. I couldn't create a system partition without the hardware config, according to what it said.

I went and installed Windows 95 with the error still present. After a number of reboots, the 162 stopped appearing, so I ran the config utility again and was able to create the system partition, and install the utility onto the drive. The F10 hotkey then worked.

Not sure why the error just suddenly vanished, but I'm not complaining. Can years of disuse cause the bios to act weird until it's used enough to become normal? Thanks again for the help.