Compaq

My freind brought his compaq to me which he formated. When i put in a win98 start up disk a message appears " Insert system disk " Anyone has ideas

 

Problem #1 - it's a propriatary machine.

Problem #2 - It needs it's own 'start-up/recovery' disk/CD, not a standard Win startup disk.

Compaq, and other 'propriatary' machines store such things as the BIOS & partitioning info on the hard drive. So - wipe the drive = wipe the BIOS - no specific start-up CD = still no BIOS & special files. You may try the Compaq site for specific drivers and such, but without that disk, I beleive you are in for an ordeal.

Good Luck

Ski

 

Check the CMOS settings to make sure the A: drive is set as the first boot device. Also try another boot disk.

Compaq's can be formated and have Windows reinstalled without using the Restore CD, a standard Windows CD will work just fine. One main disadvantage - you'll have to find the correct drivers at Compaq's web site (which is not user friendly). One main advantage - you won't have all of the original Compaq software installed; which is a good thing - I've seen freshly restored Compaq's have so many factory installed programs running at startup that the system resources are down to around 60% free.

Compaq's the only system I've ever seen that used part of the hard drive to store the system BIOS. Formating a drive doesn't affect this at all. Installing a new drive or using fdisk to delete all partitions on the old drive will affect the BIOS - it'll wipe out the BIOS. But, Compaq has SoftPaqs available that will restore this small partition (and the BIOS).