SP16085 and SP8975 : install compaq armada BIOS on a new hard drive.

versions:

SP 16085 - 10.40A - 2000 Dec 7; "bootable Diagnostics"

SP 8975 - 2.01H - 1999 Jan 24; "Computer Setup for Portables" -- this disk is bootable, but you want to boot from the other one, 16085.

So, when compaq built these Armadas, they decided to put part of the BIOS on the hard drive.  I won't discuss the wisdom of this decision, or the foresight they must have had... anyway, here we are.

If you have a new hard drive that you want to pop into one of these Armadas (or which you already have popped in and struggled with) chances are you need to install this BIOS.

Compaq seems only to distribute windows executables that write images to floppies.  I got the SoftPaqs from Compaq, created the floppies using windows, and then came over to linux, where I made images of the newly created floppies using dd.

I'll assume your floppy drive is at /dev/fd0

First you'll need two good blank disks... you should probably run badblocks /dev/fd0 on each and make sure there are no bad blocks.

To write the images to the floppies...

dd if=SP-16085.img of=/dev/fd0

(get the other disk)

dd if=SP-8975.img of=/dev/fd0


BOTH of these disks are bootable, however you want to boot from SP-16085 (which sometimes fails to boot, in my experience). It will prompt you for the SP-8975 disk during the process of installing the BIOS.

