Oh my God.
I thought I had forgotten about bloody Compaq bloody portables and their fifteen billion bloody torx screws, fifteen billion and one if you count the secret one that holds it all together and you can't find without consulting an oracle. (And no, I don't mean Larry Ellison, I mean the real thing, complete with ectoplasm.)
Old computers were nice to work on, Tim. Real ones, I mean. Compaq never made anything yet that could be classed as a "computer", just differently shaped piles of vomit. As you discovered for yourself.
The only practical way to get an old Comqcrap working is with a drive that is more or less the same as the original, if I recall the damn things. They don't even have a proper BIOS. I mean, they have to
pay someone to take a perfectly good Phoenix BIOS and hack it about untill it is unusable. Pay
extra.
(Hawk. Spit. DING!)
MFM. Indeed. Or possibly RLL, or (less likely still) EDSI.
Replacing them is easy. You just pop in an IDE controller and take out the MFM one. Then you send the MFM drive to me, because I love them.
VESA. Ahh yes. Many was the struggle I had with new-build VESA systems. But VESA
was important. If it hadn't been for VESA we might all be running proprietary MCA machines now, and paying through the nose to IBM for every one of them. VESA, despite its unlovely form and suspect reliability, saved us all from an all-pervading market dominance by a pocket-robbing set of monopoly money-grubbers. RAMBUS is just a modern imitation of the same idea.
Do I miss VESA?
Not one little bit.