Compaq Laptop question

[cyoung at bbnplanet.com (Chuck Young)]

I was working with a new guy last night who had a compaq with one of those
(annoying in my opinion) compaq partitions with diagnostics and maybe BIOS
stuff on it.  It was pretty fouled up, so I suggested he nuke the drive
with nfdisc by seagate and reinstall the compaq software from disks
available on the web, use DOS to partition off a windows partition and
then use linux to do the linux install.

After the second beer, the issue of whether lilo will overwrite the MBR in
such a way as to render the laptop's ability to access this compaq crap
came up.  I "believe" the mbr is up for grabs by whatever boot loader you
choose and it should not affect one's ability to boot into the compaq
partition or enter the BIOS.  "Believing" and knowing from experience are
two different issues.

Does anyone know for sure?  What's up with that partition anyway?  Can you
hit some keys during boot to access a standard BIOS setup? and another key
to do "diagnostics" or is it all one big bad hard drive BIOS thing?

Chuck Young
GTE Internetworking

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