Kaypro keyboard\ Compaq/Xenix questions

[Tom Jennings]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 Saquinn624 at aol.com wrote:
>> Has anyone seen anything in software that allows Compaq Deskpro 386/25
>> era computers to use "user defined" fixed disks? My type-33 still works,
>> but I wonder what to do when it dies. The Setup disk only offers several
>> preconfigured disk types.

At least tangentially useful is this: you can lie to the BIOS
about disk geometry depending on operating system.

* The BIOS only needs to know enough about disk geometry to boot
drive 0.

* The BIOS doesn't even need to know other drives (1..N) exist.


Does any OS actually read the BIOS disk settings once booted?

Just yesterday, I installed a 120GB disk in a 1995 vintage PC as
drive 1.  Drive 0 was some random 8GB thing I had laying about
(and AUTO discovered the right parms) but AUTO hung on the 120GB;
I simply marked it as NONE and installed freeBSD which determines
disk geom itself.


If you are clever you can probably work out a geometry to tell the
BIOS such that you could even boot from a "large" disk 0; it only
has to get at the first few megabytes of the disk...