Is BIOS on hard drive with Compaqs

Hello people,

Ive been asked if i can fdisk a friends computer, thing is they have a compaq and ive heard that they have their bios settings on the hard disk, Is this true and if so can anyone tell me how to get around it??
I dont want to fdisk the hard drive only to find out ive screwed their machine up.

I would appreciate any suggestions

Thankyou in advanced.

Well, usually bios is kept in cmos on motherboard, but I dont want to tell you it is the same way on compaq and mess you up. I can tell you this much though - I have and old compaq box, I did low level format and it still works. Logically, I do not think compaq does that because one of major tasks of bios is to find hdd to boot from, and if bios is on hdd, then there is no way there can be 'no boot device' kind of thing - and it does happen quite often (at least on one of my boxes).

i´ve seen several times with notebooks that they store additional data to the cmos data on the hard drive.
make sure you don´t delete any partitions besides the one that contains your OS. it probably would not go to stand-by mode anymore then since there is most times a "hibernation partition".

but i cannot recommend this either. if it won´t boot afterwards, he will probably be quite mad at you. and i know of dell taking about $400-$1000 for repairing problems like this.... (no idea about compaq support though.)

better use a software like partition magic to resize your partitions if you need to change the layout. (there should be free ones like that on sourceforge one i know of is called "GNU PartEd". But i cannot tell you which os´s and partition types it works with...)

Ah yes this is a common thing to say, yes Compaq used to do this. But not for a while, none of the newer compaqs do not even the original pink 5000 series Presarios do this. Now, what the new Presarios do is keep the restore data on the harddrive, which if you fdisk all the partitions on the disk you wont be able to use that shiny restore disk you have. As Compaq doesn't ship the true QuickRestore disks with the unit, will have to be ordered seperately. This only matters if you care about using Compaq's restore. But to answer your question, no you are safe. Good luck, hope this helps ..
Pulse

Thanks for all your replys, ll give it a go