Hi All.
I have a compaq evo n600c notebook in which I recently installed a new 149 GB hard drive; the new hard drive required a bios with 48-bit lba capability and since this became available in 2003 and my bios dates to 31/12/2003 I believed my bios would handle the new hard drive. Unfortunately, the bios gives an "NTLDR is missing" message when the computer tries to boot from the hard drive and this would seem to be due to reading the drive geometry incorrectly - 240 heads instead of 255 - so for the moment I am booting from a boot CD for Windows 2000 Pro; once Windows takes over there is no problem with the drive. Unfortunately, without a newer bios - a friend of mine has Dell laptop of comparable age with a 2005 bios that boots my hard drive with no difficulty - the only resolution to my problem would seem to be to wipe the disk and do a clean install of Windows XP, so allowing the BIOS to set the disk parameters from scratch: it will still read the head number incorrectly, but as long as it boots the drive it does not matter as Windows can read the disk. Is there another compatible compaq bios that I could use instead that would solve the problem? My current bios is Compaq 686DF v2.49 12/31/2003. Evidently no BIOS update is available for my notebook.
