help i think my computer crashed!

i have an old compaq presario 5070 with windows 98 on it. i was on the internet and the screen went blue than black and said missing operation system. i put in the restore disc that came with it and everything was going fine until it was almost done and then it said error 29 something locked. then it said restore done please reboot your computer which i did and it still says missing operation system. it sounds like something is stuck as i dont hear all the clicking and whirring you hear when it connects to the internet. is it time to play taps for this old thing or can it be restored? any info will be appreciated.

 

Hi,
Without going into to much detail (I'm a bit tired at the moment), I will take a leap and would say it was some sort of lock on the Boot Sector of the HDD. You will need to go into what Compaq call Setup. These are the BIOS settings at startup. I would be reasonably certain that you would need to tap the F10 key during the startup screens.

If you have the manual for the machine it would be a lot easier.

If there is a Security Menu, disable all the blocks and passwords. Systems of that era had an Antivirus in the BIOS (Setup). Disable it, it blocks anything from writing to or updating the boot sector information on the harddrive

...although...

I would wonder why this has happened. You may (probably) need to renew the CMOS battery. It looks like a silver coin on the motherboard (the manual will guide you...not that I can find a download of the manual at the HP website ).

The motherboard may be failing, but a few checks in the BIOS and a new battery may solve it.

Matt

 

re i think my computer crashed

hi guys, im back and on the one i thought crashed. apparently the drive was full or stuff in the drive got erased but after cussing and swearing and putting in the restore disk again all is well. i dont know what magic i did but im here! its taken me six hours to get everything back into the computer that was there to begin with tons of downloads updates etc. such fun. thanks for all of the help. its like a brand new computer again.