Microsoft > Windows NT/2000

Compaq Presario CDS 724

(1/2) > >>

comda:
Greetings!

A few years ago i bought this old timer at a garage sale just for kicks. It has a 486 thats at 66Mhz, 24mb of Ram and a 400mb hard drive. It booted Windows 3.1. I wanted to have some fun with it but i dont want to disturb the original Compaq install thats STILL on this machine.

I want to get windows 98 SE and 2000 on here jsut for fun. Now YES i know 2000 is gonna make this old timer work HARD. But i want to try it. I know the record is a 25Mhz 386?

Anyways. Ive placed a 3Gb Fujitsu hard drive that i know works. But when i plugged it in all that happens is the machine does it ram test and the cursor sits there. I realize i need to make a boot floppy, but it wont even boot my windows 98 SE floppy. I will be putting more RAM into it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Geek-9pm:
A machine that old will have trouble with a newer hard drive.
That machine will work find on a 500  MB drive. Right, Megabyte, not Gigabyte.
Did you prepare the hard drive on another computer?
If not, try this:
Remove all partitions on the hard drive.
Format a single partition with less than 2 GB and make it active.
Make sure the drive is set to master.

comda:
Thanks for the quick reply. Gosh i do not have a smaller drive then 2Gb.
Also just for kicks i placed the original hard drive back in. Odly it began to click. After a restart it booted fine and i discovered the floppy drive isnt working. Any tips on cleaning that? or just replace it?

Geek-9pm:
Years ago I used to repair floppy drives. It is a hit and miss thing.
You might have to find a good used floppy  drive.

Older BIOS had a definition for hard drive structure that does not work for large drives. So you have to format it for some value under 2 GB.

Checking on eBay, that computer is not worth keeping.
Unless you hate somebody.
 Give it to your rival and taught him with "You can't fix it!"  (|

BC_Programmer:
That model usually came with a 270MB Drive, or thereabouts. The System dates to around 1994, which means it may be limited to a maximum HDD size of 528MB. However as the workarounds that changed the limit to 2.1GB up through 1996 were introduced in 1994 it's possible it could accept a larger Drive. 3GB is pretty certain to exceed the BIOS capabilities, however. FRor what you're doing a CompactFlash Adapter would work pretty well. You can get 512MB or 256MB CF cards dirt cheap or even in bulk, and swap them into an adapter fairly easily.

Getting Windows 2000 on a 486 may require some workarounds (disabling L2 cache, etc.) depending on the system. Look forward to waiting around 2 to 3 hours for it to complete the initial "Copying files" steps, as well.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page