System Upgrade - Adding a New Hard Drive

Simple task

Open the case
(It once took me over 3 hours to figure out how to open a Compaq case. There was a slide lock on the back.)
Mount the drive in an available bay
(Some systems do not have as many available bays as they appear to they have.)
Partition and format the drive
(Hey, it sounds easy.)
Close the case
(Make sure it is working first.)

Extra Drive Bays

Just because your case has slots for so many 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" devices does not mean that you can actually add that many devices to your system. For instance

In a Compaq Presario, the "available" 3 1/2" drive slot was not available to accept a hard drive because the processor fan was in the way. However, there appeared to be enough room to added a second floppy drive.
In a different (older) Compaq, special, proprietary mounting rails were required to mount the drive. (In this case, proprietary meant that none of the local computer stores carried the necessary rails - they had to be purchased directly from Compaq.)
In a Gateway system, the spare 5 1/4" bay would accept a hard drive, but would not accept the removable caddy I wanted to mount it in ... the mother board was in the way.

Partitioning and Formating the Drive

Well, in order to partition and format the drive, you must first turn on the system.

With a Compaq Presario 5451, Series CM0204, the system refused to boot with the new MAxtor 40 GB hard drive on the secondary IDE port (same cable as the CD ROM). After I lost access to the system, I discovered (using on-line documentation, not the provided paper documentation) that there was an alternate jumper configuration for situations like this. Search Maxtor.com for "Capacity Limitation Jumper".
Based on an email communication, at least one person was able to add a second harddrive to a Compaq Presario 7474 - 60G formatted as 3 partitions.

Many old systems only support drives up to 8 GB (and sometimes, even smaller). Since most new (Jan 2002) drives are 20 GB or larger, special software is necessary to access the entire drive. (The simple fact that Windows is capable of supporting larger drives does not guarantee that you can partition it.)

Raw Notes - New Years 2002

I tried to install a Maxtor 40 GB hard drive on the secondary IDE port of

  Compaq Presario 5451
  Series CM0204

  Gigabyte - GA-5SMM motherboard
  Award BIOS - 1.2D 1998

I tried all the standard combinations - Master, slave, with and without the CD drive.

In every case, the system simply refused to boot.

Well, I search www.compaq.com for help - lots of adds, but no technical data.

On the gigabyte site, I found information indicating that Compaq had intentionally modified the BIOS so that only a single hard drive would be supported.

Specifically, the available BIOS options to detect the IDE drives were missing on the Compaq, but they were shown on the Award site.

So, now the question is

I finally placed the 40 GB hard drive in another system. It formatted just fine - all 2 GB are available!

I have no idea how to make the rest of the drive visible - perhaps I should run FDISK.

The software which came with the hard drive indicated that the BIOS would not see more than 8 GB. However, when I went to install the Maxtor fix, it specifically said that Windows 98 would not have any problem seeing the entire drive.

At this point, I lost access to the machine and was unable to continue.

Unable to install a 40 GB hard drive in a

  Compaq Presario - 5451
  Series CM0204

 Gigabyte GA-5SMM Mother board

 Award BIOS 1.2D 1998

Tried all combinations on the 2nd IDE port
As long as the hard drive was connected, the system would not boot.

It appears to have custom BIOS - the hard drive settings shown on the Gigabyte site (pdf Manuals) has many extra settings, including those to configure the IDE ports. This computer was (is) missing those options.

It appears the Compaq intentionally modified the BIOS to never allow a second hard drive to be added.

It appears that a BIOS upgrade is needed to allow 256MB DIMMs

The Compaq site seems to be good for advertisements only. I was not able to find any technical data by searching on the model numbers or the motherboard number.

Please let me know if you have had a different experience with this machine.

PS - I have installed second hard drives in other Compaq systems.

Author: Robert Clemenzi - clemenzi@cpcug.org