Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Man, I don't think anything Compaq made deserved a decent reputation even into the mid-90s when 486s started to become mainstream.
I should note that was the point when product lines started to segregate and we got consumer and business systems, but Compaq was always one of those companies that could fuck up making ice. Its business machines would be full of different-sized Torx screws and easy access to nothing, which made them an absolute nightmare to work on.
I'm sure I've made this point before, but I remember being able to boot off USB on the very first IBM desktops I ever saw with USB ports. I had an extremely exotic 4GB 3.5" drive in a USB enclosure for doing data transfers in 1998 or 1999. Seeing that it was a boot option on those guys led me to install DOS on it and sure enough, that shit could start that PC. Which is the world of difference between how IBM did things and what Compaq was doing with its engineering. I have an IBM laptop from that era that could also boot from USB. Thinkpad 600, maybe?
(I actually have a collection of Thinkpads in my bedroom closet that's about four feet high. They're the retro-hardware I'm most likely to keep)
Regarding the drive size limit, Compaq (and later HP) had a bunch of BIOS programmers on staff, so when working with their products back in the day, it was extremely common for fixes to be BIOS updates instead of OS patches. It's very possible that your laptop had an update that's been lost to time since I'm sure those updates are long gone from the internet at this point.
I should note that was the point when product lines started to segregate and we got consumer and business systems, but Compaq was always one of those companies that could fuck up making ice. Its business machines would be full of different-sized Torx screws and easy access to nothing, which made them an absolute nightmare to work on.
I'm sure I've made this point before, but I remember being able to boot off USB on the very first IBM desktops I ever saw with USB ports. I had an extremely exotic 4GB 3.5" drive in a USB enclosure for doing data transfers in 1998 or 1999. Seeing that it was a boot option on those guys led me to install DOS on it and sure enough, that shit could start that PC. Which is the world of difference between how IBM did things and what Compaq was doing with its engineering. I have an IBM laptop from that era that could also boot from USB. Thinkpad 600, maybe?
(I actually have a collection of Thinkpads in my bedroom closet that's about four feet high. They're the retro-hardware I'm most likely to keep)
Regarding the drive size limit, Compaq (and later HP) had a bunch of BIOS programmers on staff, so when working with their products back in the day, it was extremely common for fixes to be BIOS updates instead of OS patches. It's very possible that your laptop had an update that's been lost to time since I'm sure those updates are long gone from the internet at this point.
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