Hard Time With Installing ANY OS

[lilstewart92]

Hi-

I'm brand new to AnandTech and I really need some help. I have this 1999 laptop that was given to me for free, a Compaq Armada 6500. I really want to fix this up.

Here's my difficulty. It had a corrupt win98 install, so I fdisk'd it and formatted the HD (6GB). Since then, I can't get it to boot from a CD or a floppy. The CD drive does work as I upgraded it to Win98 yesterday before I formatted. The thing doesn't have drivers for a CD drive and I put them on a floppy and I can't get it to get into a DOS mode to put them on the HD; pressing F8 won't work. It has the Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0.R; System BIO Revision = 1.54.

Can SOMEONE help me?



EDIT: The machine has a 300MHz PII processor with 64MB RAM.

 

[lilstewart92]

ANYONE?

 

[keeleysam]

Did you make the floppy bootable?

 

[lilstewart92]

Yes.

 

[keeleysam]

Did you test it on another computer?

 

[spherrod]

It's not clear from your original post - what is the boot order set to in the BIOS?

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Yeah seems like the boot order in the BIOS isn't set correctly. You could even try hitting F11 when it starts to boot up, on some BIOS's that brings up a screen where you can choose to boot a device from. But yeah, check your boot order in the BIOS.

 

[lilstewart92]

It's -

Floppy goes first
Cd goes second
hd goes third

 

[kevinthenerd]

The BIOS key on an old Compaq is F10 when the cursor goes to the topright of the screen.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Try getting a Knoppix disc to work. I use Knoppix all the time for its disk utilities when Windows won't start.