On Feb 1, 2004, at 11:26 am, Gregg Eshelman wrote:
Dunno about SCSI drives, but I did have an 8gig IDE drive that came out of a Compaq PC. The first and default ROM entry was setup to show 13 gigs. When I called up the company, (WD or Seagate, forgot which now) and the call got escalated a level, the higher up tech passed it as a warranty issue with no trouble. He said they'd seen that a lot when drives removed from Compaq computers were used in other systems. Apparently Compaq deliberately fouled the first capacity settings in the drive's ROM and programmed their computer BIOS to use the second entry by default.
It didn't prevent the drive from being used in a non-Compaq PC, but it sure bollixed up drive utilities like Norton that would insist there was a "problem" because the drive was "supposed to be 13gigs", not the 8 it actually was. I was hoping they'd send me a 13gig but they sent me a new 8gig, which promptly died two weeks later so I got yet another warranty replacement that never had a problem.
I hope that since the HP-Compaq merger that such silly business has stopped.
Compaq and hard disks - not a great combination. They used to use a whacked-out system of putting half the BIOS settings on he first 64k of the hard disk in PCs to prevent you from upgrading it - it lost half it's BIOS settings and went dead if you disconnected the hard disk, and any drive failures meant a warranty return.
Another story I heard on the grapevine is that in the days when the hard disks wouldn't outlast the 3 year warranty on PCs, engineers faced with warranty repairs on stiction'd drives used to drop them off the bench to free them up and stick them back in to try and get it thru the warranty period. I never recommeded Compaq to anyone. I always recommend Dell or build your own PC.
Compaq part numbers on SCA and LVD (68pin) drives are always a thing to look out for as it's a good indicator that they are pulls from Compaq Prolient servers and have probably been running 24/7 since new. Definitely to be avoided...
-- Mark Benson
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