Compaq hidden patition

Message

shakespeare · #1 Post by **shakespeare** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 9:00 am

I have a drive from an old Compaq Presario that has a hidden partition that contains the bios. Yes, the bios. Don't ask me why but this is the way Compaq chose to do things years ago. I want to delete the contents of this hidden partition but I'm not sure which tool would be the best. Suggestions?

The Piney · #2 Post by **The Piney** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 11:25 am

I think the BIOS is still on the board, but the the hard drive contains the setup program in a hidden partition, which you can download from Compaq/HP. For some systems you can just repartition the drive, but some drives such as the Maxtor 6E040L0 you have to edit the drive to get the full size to show. This drive is marked with a label as a 20GB drive but is actually a 40GB drive. If you have this particular drive you can use HDAT2, which is included on the UBCD disk to reset the drive from the 20GB limit to 40GB by changing the LBA addressing from 28bit to 48bit.

shakespeare · #3 Post by **shakespeare** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 12:18 pm

It's a Seagate 330 MB SATA drive that was an upgrade. I'll look at the utility suggested but this is an NTFS drive, so I need to be able to edit that type. Did a little searching and found a free utility called AEFDISK that claims it will do the job. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd be interested.

Constance · #4 Post by **Constance** » Sat Aug 25, 2007 11:34 pm

NTFS has nothing to do with the drive itself, only with partitions.