First post, by bachler
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all,
I have been working for a while now on a BIOS modification for the Compaq LTE 5000-series laptops to add XTIDE Universal BIOS support directly into the system BIOS.
The short version: this lets the LTE 5000-series work with larger IDE storage than the stock BIOS normally handles.
I have been using it with IDE-to-CF adapters and an SD-to-IDE adapter, including a 128 GB microSD card setup.
I put together a small release page here: https://www.bachler.se/lte5000xtide/
The page includes:
- a ready-to-use bootable floppy image and a zip with the rompaq util etc.
- some notes and photos from the development process
The floppy image is probably what most people want. Write it to a 1.44 MB floppy, boot the LTE 5000 from it, and follow the ROMPaq prompts.
A bit of background: the LTE 5000-series BIOS appears to have the usual old drive size limitations. XTIDE Universal BIOS already solves this nicely on desktop machines with an option ROM, but laptops are awkward
because there is usually no easy way to add one.
I ended up unpacking the Compaq ROMPaq BIOS image, adding XTIDE into unused ROM space, adding a small helper/hook around the option ROM scanner path, fixing checksums, and repacking it as a ROMPaq-flashable image.
This was developed and tested on my LTE 5400, with some fairly ridiculous hardware iteration involving a desoldered flash chip and a little external fixture so I could keep reflashing during development.
I have successfully tested the resulting floppy image on a few of my LTE 5000-series machines.
As always with BIOS flashing: use at your own risk. Make sure you have the right machine, stable power, and ideally some way to recover if something goes wrong.
Hopefully this is useful to someone else trying to keep one of these machines practical with modern-ish storage.
I'll add the floppy image here as an attachment.
Checksum: cd961bc36ea0e20b37f489187b5811eabf2c0d763fbe58b558d4f85183652aa4 lte5000-xtide-floppy.img