I am trying to upgrade my Grandson’s Compaq Deskpro PC by installing a slave hard drive to increase the storage capacity. As the PC is old (1998) it only has a small hard disc (2.2gb). To experiment I installed an old drive(800mb) and the PC booted up perfectly and there was the extra drive all ready to go!
Encouraged by this success I went out and bought a 20Gb drive and installed this using an 80 wire ribbon cable with the new drive connected to the centre socket and both drives set to “cable select” ( The new drive does not have a jumper position for “slave”.)
So, all connected, now to boot up and it would work like the first time. Wrong!!
The new drive did not appear.
At boot up, a message appeared:
Confirm following updates:
Disc 1 3226 mb
Disc 2 8454 mb
F1 to save
Pressing F1 PC finished boot up but as I said no slave drive!
Maybe the BIOS/CMOS needs the settings changed to auto detect the new drive.
BIG PROBLEM! No way can I get into the BIOS. I have tried all the usual keys at start-up (ctl/alt/esc, del, F10, F1, esc, break) but apart from F10 and Break which stop the boot but do not open BIOS the other keys just bring up “keyboard error”
I put the small slave drive back in, Boot up detected the changed settings and booted up OK again.
As I am not a computer expert, that’s me finished!
This is supposed to be an Xmas present for my Grandson, so I would be extremely grateful if there is someone out there who could point me in the right direction.
Thankyou

Problem Solved!
I downloaded a BIOS upgrade from the COMPAQ website which enabled me to detect and format the new hard drives.
However, I now have another problem! When I installed the operating system on C drive it shrunk the disk capacity. See new thread.

Hi Vogelswatcher,

Sorry we didn't get to you sooner. As I was reading through your post, I was about to suggest the same solution - older BIOSes are only able to read up to 8.4Gb hard disks. With a PC that old, you're fortunate that the BIOS update is still available

I'll take a look for your new thread and see if that's still outstanding

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