Help Installing 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.

 

[youph]

Get a 98 boot floppy (aka rescue disk) from someone that has a working 98 system.

I forget the process (I havent ran windows 98 in over 5 years) but I do know it will create a bootable floppy disk with CD ROM drivers to reinstall with.

The reason you cant boot off the CD is probably that your laptop doesnt support ATAPI boot as its pretty old.

So, boot off the floppy which will bring you to an a:\ prompt with CD support. Change to the CD ROM drive and run setup. Should work.

 

[CTho9305]

Try the Operating Systems forum if you have a question about an operating system.

 

[Bassyhead]

Welcome to Anandtech. Please see the first post of this forum.

 

[RebateMonger]

Is the boot order in the Compaq BIOS set to first try to boot from a floppy or a CD, instead of the hard drive?

 

[lilstewart92]

Thanks for the replys, please please share your ideas as I really want to get this working...even if you don't know exactly!

The compaq BIOS is setup to start from a cd then floppy then HD, I have a Win98 boot disk, I guess I could try and remake one from a computer downstairs...
The floppy is sorta broken, but sorta not. It has a mind of it's own, it works sometimes and it doesn't work others.

I can get to setup, but I CAN NOT GET TO DOS!! HELP!!!!!

 

[lilstewart92]

Sorry; mr. moderator can delete this thread, Thanks!

 

[RebateMonger]

Windows 98 allows the creation of a special "Startup Disk". This is a floppy disk that boots to DOS and has built-in drivers that support most CDROM drives. Once you have created this "Startup Disk", you can boot to it and then insert a Windows Install CD into the CDROM drive and finish the Windows install.

To create this special floppy disk, in Windows 98:

/Start/Settings/Control Panel/Startup Disk/Create Disk.....

If you don't have a Windows 98 PC available, you can download a bootdisk creation program at http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm.