MARTIN ATKINS wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON:

-=> ROY J. TELLASON wrote to ALL <=-

RJT> So I got this kinda nice HP machine,  and I'm trying to see where I can
RJT> go with it...

RJT> It's only got 64M of ram in it,  a 10G HD,  and when you power it up
RJT> there's the option to run some diagnostics,  which are apparently
RJT> installed on the HD in a small separate partition.

MA> You say apparently. If it has it's own partition you should be able
MA> to see it.

Well,  yeah.

MA> I could be called from the MBR but more than likely it is a kernel  
MA> call by the HP installation disk.

I don't understand what you're saying here.

RJT> I want to put more ram in there,  lose the 98 install,  and put a
RJT> somewhat smaller HD in it to use the box as a workstation.  I'd like to
RJT> be able to keep those diagnostics if I can.

MA> I think if you loss the win98 install you will loss the tools.

So it appears.

RJT> At first I thought it'd be easy enough to copy that smallish partition
RJT> over to another drive,  but I'm not sure about how I'd get it to _boot_
RJT> into that the way it does now.

MA> What about you junk as much of the win98 as is practically possible
MA> and see how small you can get it. Then use something like "fips" to
MA> shrink the partition. That will give you something which is easily
MA> movable with XXCOPY. XXCOPY the entire setup over to another disk
MA> and make it bootable with "fdisk /mbr". If the xcopied disk boots
MA> with the tools then the tools are not being called from the MBR.

This doesn't make sense.  How is something going to boot and _not_ be
called from the MBR?  I thought about doing an fdisk /mbr,  but that just
writes the boot code from that particular copy of fdisk,  apparently,  so
I'd have to use the w98 version of it.  And I know of no way to tell it to
write the MBR on a second drive,  offhand.  I'm *really* not into wasting
the time screwing around with that copy of 98 anyhow.

MA> This means it's save to move it off the 10gig as you have it on the
MA> other disk.

I did copy that smallish partition over to the other HD,  using dd. 
Couldn't get it to work,  though.  I finally gave up on the idea as a waste
of time and wiped it,  re-doing my partitions.

RJT> So last night I start poking around on HP's web site,  and I found the
RJT> stuff for that model machine ("Brio BA210").  I thought I was on to
RJT> something when I saw "OS Independent" but that link
pointed to a 2M+
RJT> ".exe" file. Which file, when I try to run it on this box,  says
RJT> "Cannot be run in DOS mode".  WTF?  So I looked some more,  and the
RJT> next logical choice seems to be getting the software for
"DOS".  Only
RJT> thing is,  that's a 159MB ISO file!  No way am I gonna download that
RJT> without being sure that it's what I'd need to make this work...

MA> Im not sure about all this but it looks like you have a vendor
MA> installation so it may be specific to the machine it was installed
MA> on. What ever these tools are i don't see what a proper instalation
MA> of 98 won't be able to do if you have the hardware drivers.

Yeah,  well,  I don't tend to think of using 98 for "tools",  not
when I have so much better in the way of tools around in other platforms.

MA> Anyway if they tickle your fancy you can always build around the
MA> shrunken partition with a boot loader. It is not an ideal solution
MA> but you can always use the tools by booting to the vendor install.
MA> On the upside it does give you more time to see if the tools can be
MA> separated from the system.

The original drive is now out,  sitting here on my desk.  I have other
drives that I'm going to use first,  but it's really not that big of a deal
to me at this point to salvage that stuff.  I do have that downloaded file
to install that stuff,  maybe I'll have a go at playing with it on the one
98 box here (also a Compaq as it turns out),  but it's not real high up on
my list...

RJT> Any of you guys have suggestions as to how I might make this work?

MA> I've used xxcopy on a WIN/ME and it went without a hickup. If you
MA> can transport the opperating/partition around you can clone it to a
MA> slave and have the boot loader select it if you need to probe
MA> hardware. 

I suspect that I could also have messed around with LILO to get that
diagnostic partition to boot.  If I get to it before wiping that drive
perhaps I can get there,  but I have an awful lot of stuff to do here
besides,  so at this point in time I'm not terribly worried about it.

I *did* run all of those diagnostics first,  when I found them,  and
everything seems to be working just fine.  :-)

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