[ILUG] compaq bios large disk problem

[g whitley mott]

yowsa,

still banging my head on this compaq pro workstation 5100 bios.  after
putting a new 160g drive in the athlon, the plan was to put the "old"
30g disk in the compaq and make a nice webserver.

but at startup, the braindead compaq bios always complains "1790-Disk 0
Error", and won't boot until i press F1, presumably so we can stand at
length in awe of it's prowess at discovering the error.  even though,
after that, linux has no trouble booting and using the whole 30g.

i am to the point where i really want to just chuck it out the window. 
it's no use to me if i can't trust it to reboot unattended.  of course
i'll be delighted to accept offers of better hardware instead of answers
to this question!

how do i beat the gd compaq bios into submission?  it's apparently the
latest bios upgrade they made, 98.09.25 (tho their web page lists it as
"previous", lists the 98.07.04 version as "current", and gives "16 Jul
98" as the release date for both).

i've tried using the compaq diag floppy to create a compaq setup
partition, but it always complains there is no room on the disk to
create its partition, no matter if the disk is nothing but zeros, no
matter if i prepare the disk with a MaxBlast3.6 DDO or without, no
matter if i have a valid partition table with plenty of free space at
the begin of the disk, no matter if i've set the LBAmax to 16514064.

and wouldn't you know, MaxBlast allowed me to set the LBAmax to
16514064, but now fails when i try to set it to 16498944, or even back
to the actual 58633344!  hmm.

one of my hopeful ideas stems from noticing that, when i boot from the
compaq diag floppy, it boots straight into MSDOS without waiting for
F1!  hark, the elusive and mysterious unattended boot!  it won't do that
for any other floppy, not while the 30g disk is present.  i've no idea
what's so magic about that floppy, tho my guess is something to do with
the single config.sys line which says "shell=test.com /p /d".  maybe if
i were to be able to come up with a suitable substitute for test.com, i
could have an unattended boot.  but it's only a shot in the dark, and
i'm a tad at a loss, i've never produced an a mess dos .com, don't
exactly know where to begin..

any reasonable person would have given up LONG ago.  any unreasonable
compaq geeks out there?

if none of youse have a nice magical answer, i suppose mebbe i can ditch
the cd drive and dust off a small drive to be the boot drive.  only one
ide controller in this thing, the other is a scsi.  high end machine. 
kwitcher sniggers.

tia,
-g