Technical Question > Hard drive>Bios>Omnibook 5700

[LinuxMint-4]

Technical Question > Hard drive>Bios>Omnibook 5700


I been trying to install a 6 GB hard drive (actually 6.007 GB) into a Omnibook 5700 laptop and in the bios. I can select a custom hard drive but I need to manually put in. The computer is fairly old but in great shape otherwise.

type code#
# cylinders,
#heads
#sectors/track
landing zone
write precomp

I tried Auto ID, that did not work. The hard drive is fine but the Omnibook does not recognize it. I need to set up the bios so the Omnibook will recognize the hard drive.

I looked in the Omnibook 5700 pdf online and searched several pages and found nothing.

Is there a chart or some kind of reference that I can use to get these parameters so I can install the hard drive?

Thanks

[LinuxMint-4]

Just a follow up, I found the site where the hard drive was from. I put in the HD number and the site listed all the information except landing zone and the write precomp. I put in whatever parameters I could and still nothing.

I ended up installing a 2.1 gig hard drive and the laptop recognized it with no problem. Ya gotta love ancient technology. I am going to throw NT4.0 on this for now, until I can figure how to install some lite weight Linux distro on it. The RAM is only 49 MB and its one of those funky proprietary RAM sticks. On E-Bay a 96 MB RAM stick sells for $90, and the upper limits of this is 128 MB RAM max.

The problem with this laptop is you can't boot from the CD-ROM , you need floppies and then it will install from the CD drive. Would love to put Xubuntu on this, 49 MB might be too low and since it can't boot from the CD...I'm stuck with NT 4.0 for now. That $14 investment of NT 4.0 from E-bay turned out to be a OK investment....lol

I think the next thing I will try is to take the 2.1 gig out and attempt to install Xubuntu on it with another laptop swapping the hard drives out and then installing it back in. If it works...I'll add a update...thanks for reading.

[dann]

Hmmmm... these values should be printed somewhere on the hard drive itself. Barring that, I guess you have most of what you want from the pdf. As for landing zone, that is the cylinder the bios will park the drive head on when they rest. This value is not necessary for modern hard drives as they autopark but according to this website: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/bios/s ... ing-c.html you may be able to get away with putting in the last cylinder number. I believe cylinder numbering starts at 0 so a 5000 cylinder hd would have the last cylinder at 4999.

You might want to look into a bios update too for the system, if you think it is worth it. Just remember that after initializing the boot manager Linux does not use the bios.

[LinuxMint-4]

Just a update of sorts... This has been a long term project, something that I wanted but not needed to get done.

I found a excellent video on how to install DSL at You Tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhP17LPOCOU

Using another computer to install DSL on to the Omnibook 5700 2.1 GB hard drive (because the HP5700 can't boot from CD). Now I have to resolve video and mouse issues. But at least I have DSL on the computer now. If need be I can redo it again. It only takes about 10 minutes just following the video. If I get the DSL actually working like it is supposed to..then I'll post a picture of the desktop.