Compaq ProLinea Motherboard and BIOS Restoration

From 1992 through 1996, Compaq released a series of ProLinea 386, 486 and Pentium motherboards that had a BIOS unlike most others at the time.
#prolinea #compaq
The BIOS was based on an AMI chip but was not accessible via the normal process of pressing the DELETE or F2 or any other key during the boost sequence.
Instead, the BIOS was accessible as a NON-DOS partition on the hard drive and was accessible by pressing the F10 key during the boot when a square cursor appeared in the upper right-hand corner. Without this partition, there is NO WAY to access the motherboard BIOS or settings.
We'll first take a good look at a ProLinea motherboard that was rescued from the remains of a 486 4/66 system complete with a 128 KB COASt cache card.
Then we'll slow walk through booting the motherboard with the BIOS in place, then deleting it to demonstrate a new hard drive installation and finally reinstalling the BIOS onto the replacement hard drive again.
Link to the ProLinea MT (this one!) mother board schematic and jumper settings: stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherbo...
Link to downloading the Compaq Deskpro/ProLinea SETUP/DIAGNOSTICS Floppy Disk Images: archive.org/details/sp1363
These disk images are best opened and copied using a program like WinImage because they are bootable disk images. Merely copying the files from these images to blank floppy disks will not work.
Index:
0:00 The Compaq ProLinea MT Motherboard
2:45 Accessing and Exploring the working BIOS
8:56 Deleting the NON-DOS Partition to simulate a hard drive replacement
11:21 Installing the BIOS from the 1363 and 16085 disk images
17:51 Creating a DOS Partition and formatting/installing MS-DOS 6.22

[@RetroTinkerer]

That was a very cool walkthrough on how to get that BIOS files and partition restored, if I ever encounter such a system it will be super helpful to remember it, thanks Mike!

[@UncleMikeRetro]

You are a saint to say all that! I hated to have researched all that I did and not having documented it. If I can find one ProLinea, then we all can find one someday 😁

[@mathisytofficiel4456]

I have compaq prolinea 5100 with pentium 100mhz, very cool machine for msdos and win95 👍

[@UncleMikeRetro]

I wish I had started collecting these systems along with my Packard Bells and Gateways. They are classics!

[@Shmbler]

I wonder if the onboard CL graphics chip is connected via 32 bit local bus. Could well be. VLB CL graphics are pretty fast. Crazy that they fitted 4 PS2 slots AND onboard RAM.

[@UncleMikeRetro]

I wondered too. Maybe I try to bench the graphics sometime. It could be a 32-bit bus alright. Really, the integrated stuff is remarkable: IDE/floppy, 4 MG RAM, graphics, PS/2 ports... Really nice overall!

[@Pickle136]

havnt seen a coast module like that.

[@UncleMikeRetro]

apparently, they are so HARD to get nowadays if you need one. very mobo specific

[@sergeymihaylov7248]

Круто

[@UncleMikeRetro]

Thank you kindly!