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Compaq Portable BIOS Diskettes

Compaq computers of the Portable II and Portable III era did not have BIOS modification screens built into ROM as became the standard in the industry. With most machines, you can hold some combination of keys on the keyboard while the machine is booting up and get to a configuration screen before DOS loads. Compaq machines, however, use a different strategy.

The only way to change BIOS variables on these machines is to boot the Compaq Diagnostics Diskette, which then provides the user interface to make changes to the BIOS. If you don’t have that diskette, you aren’t going to be successful with a Compaq Portable II or Portable III.

How It Works

The utility, when executed, creates two utility floppy diskettes. You don’t need to run these executables on the Compaq itself - they simply unpack and create bootable floppy diskettes that you then use to boot the Compaq.

You can run the utility on any DOS machine (or DOSBox) to create the floppy diskettes, then boot your Compaq Portable from the first diskette to access the BIOS setup.

Downloads

There are two versions of the utility depending on what floppy drive your machine has:

For 360K 5.25" Floppy Drives

Download SP0316 - 360K Floppy Version (ZIP)

Use this version if your Compaq has a 360K 5.25" floppy drive (common on Portable II Model 4).

For 720K 3.5" Floppy Drives

Download SP0308 - 720K Floppy Version (ZIP)

Use this version if your Compaq has a 720K 3.5" floppy drive.

Creating the Diskettes

  1. Extract the ZIP file on a DOS machine or in DOSBox
  2. Run the extracted executable
  3. Insert blank floppy diskettes when prompted
  4. The utility will create two bootable diskettes

Using the Diskettes

  1. Insert the first diskette into your Compaq Portable
  2. Power on or reset the machine
  3. The machine will boot from the floppy
  4. Follow the on-screen prompts to configure BIOS settings

Notes

These utilities were originally hosted on an HP FTP server (Compaq was acquired by HP in 2002). As these files become increasingly difficult to find online, they are preserved here for the vintage computing community.