X-mas gift, need to get a old pc running agian

I just found out that my bros girlfriend is getting me something for x-mas and broke as I am I can't get anything for her so I wanted to get this old workstation I have running again so I could give it to her. It's a Compaq proffesional workstation 5100, it has a decent amount of ram supports both ide and scsi, but at the moment I only have a scsi drive in it which only has 2gbs, I wanted to either get a bigger scsi drive or get it to run along with a ide drive that I have around, but the problem is the thing doesn't have a bios like we know it, it's not as simple as pressing del it has a utility that I have to download onto a floppy but to be able to use it has to create a partition on a drive which it was never able to do, so I was able to see some of the options that the utility has but without this partition nothing is saved and I can't get it to reconize the cd-rom and the when I put the ide hdd in it tried to boot from there. Now I was able install winxp on it, but it use 1.5gs so all I have left is 400mb and since I gave away my win98 cd i don't have anything to install on it. So I'm a bit lost and needed some help to get this going again, I'll post some links to info on the pc as soon as I find.

edit: Link is up.

Now that winxp is on it I need to get it to reconize the ide hdd, if anyone has any experiance with this pc please help.

theres gotta be a BIOS to it, plain and simple. a regular bios..seem to me, you can simply disable/enable SCSI/IDE in the bios...just my .02..can you give any other info on it? also, go on google, type the name of it and add .pdf to it..im betting thatll turn up the adobe acrobat version of the manual

There is a bios, but I need to use there "F10" utility to get to it, at first I though they meant I had to press f10 to enter the bios setup but it was only the name of the utility, I have seen the manual and it doesn't help me much. But I thing I"ll give up on getting this scsi drive working with the ide drive, I think I'll just get a new one for myself and put the 20gb on it, then I'll try to convince my brother to pay for a p2, a question though are all p2s unlocked, cause I need a 333mhz p2 but I do have multi adjustments on the mobo?

Save yourself the hassle and get her like lotions and stuff like that. Trust me man!

Well, on really old computers the BIOS was not on the mobo but rather on a floppy disk. Fortunately this computer is not that old. However, Compaq has been known to hide the BIOS to keep people out of it. There are a few things that you can try to get into it.

1. Hit any key a few times right after you power the system on. Sometimes that is all you need to get it to show you the POST screen.

2. If that does not work, then don't just assume that it is the delete key that get you into the BIOS. According to the PDF that I found in your link, the F10 key might work.

3. If the F10 key is not the right one then some other keys that were often used on older computers to get into the BIOS were the F1 Page Down or ESCape keys.

If none of that works, you will probably have to pull the SCSI card or if the drive is directly connected to the MOBO, you may have to pull the cable as some of the older hardware runs the SCSI BIOS before the MOBO BIOS.

Christmas is gone, and she got that already, and I've tried to give her a pc before which she wasn't able to set up and someone told her the monitor was bad and through it away, I got kept this pc here to try to get it working again to give it to her but I tried and it's not that simple, and I not about to give up on this, the more I get pissed off at it the more I want to get it fixed, and after all she doens't have anything else and she got me something cool, that I liked at, ant that is pretty hard to do.

Malpine Walis said:

Well, on really old computers the BIOS was not on the mobo but rather on a floppy disk. Fortunately this computer is not that old. However, Compaq has been known to hide the BIOS to keep people out of it. There are a few things that you can try to get into it.

1. Hit any key a few times right after you power the system on. Sometimes that is all you need to get it to show you the POST screen.

2. If that does not work, then don't just assume that it is the delete key that get you into the BIOS. According to the PDF that I found in your link, the F10 key might work.

3. If the F10 key is not the right one then some other keys that were often used on older computers to get into the BIOS were the F1 Page Down or ESCape keys.

If none of that works, you will probably have to pull the SCSI card or if the drive is directly connected to the MOBO, you may have to pull the cable as some of the older hardware runs the SCSI BIOS before the MOBO BIOS.

Click to expand...

I'll try some of that, I also read the manual, and was a bit confused about the F10 thing.

And while I am typing my last, we find that you want to OC the thing as well. You can do that but try to get it working at default first. Then tell us about the proc. Is it a chip that goes directly on the mobo like we use today? Or is it on a daughter board (looks kind of like the old atari cartridge games)? Either way, OCing the rig is going to be interesting due to the fact that the older hardware needs to be handled differently. often the BIOS was not even part of the OC process. Cross your fingers and hope that you don't have to use "golden fingers" or a soldering iron.

Oh i don't really plan on ocing it, I just want to know if I get a pII at 400mhz that I'll be able to run it at 333mhz, by the way it's a slot instead of a socket, and I've oced a p2 before gave it a boost from 233mhz to 300mhz, I was surprised to see that the bios had an option to change the multi.

edit: by the way I pressed the buttons that you said and got nothing, I don't think they would make a floppy utility if they had a bios interface already.