I have a Compaq Armada 1750 with Windows 95. At one time I wanted to put some modern Linux distro on it, so I gave it to the school tech guy to see if he could get a larger stick of ram for it (it had 128mb). When I got it back, the already damaged left hinge was completely broken, and the guy said that he wasn't working with something that old.
When I turned it on, the Compaq boot logo came up as usual, but then the screen began flickering. It did this for a few minutes, then said "Non-System disc. Please insert the system disc and press any key to continue." I put in the reinstall cd in, but the same thing happened (and I know that disc was good. I just used it the previous week.
I can't figure out this problem. Does anyone have any ideas?
It sounds like the laptop is trying to boot to the hard disk, which has a damaged mbr (maybe). make sure that the cd is selected as the boot method. If it is, then maybe the install cd is formatted badly for booting from (?).
How did you make the bootCD (or is it the windows installation disk)?
It is the Windows installation disc. Nothing I try to boot from works at all.
Angelstorm9x3 wrote:
It is the Windows installation disc. Nothing I try to boot from works at all.
How are you booting to the CD?
I set the BIOS to boot from CD first. For some reason I'm not seeing the "Press F-whatever to open boot menu" or whatever it's supposed to say.
At one point I even removed the hard drive.
Windows 95 can't boot from a disk. You need to install Ms-Dos first, and then, from there, run the Cd's setup.exe.
I have a Compaq Armada 1700 and I have learned the hard way DO NOT EVER FORMAT THE DISK the BIOS is stored on the hard drive and if you formatted it you are s.c.r.e.w.e.d.
But good news, HP has the bios setup disks on their webpage!
http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/swdHome?sp4ts.oid=96619&ac.admitted=1400397442894.876444892.492883150 
Oh and to install Windows 95 you insert a DOS 5/6 bootdisk and enable CD-ROM support by loading OAKCDROM drivers and then switch to the CD drive and COPY the cd rom contents to your C:\ drive. Once that is done, run setup.exe from the WIN98 directory you copied.
Oh and to install the drivers copy the SOFTPAQs and ROMPAQs to a CD and then insert the CD and copy the drivers from the CD to C:\DRIVERS and run them using the RUN prompt.
Oh and please make sure to use 8.3 filenames and not long filenames.
Nin68 wrote:
Windows 95 can't boot from a disk. You need to install Ms-Dos first, and then, from there, run the Cd's setup.exe.
Tom wrote:
Oh and to install Windows 95 you insert a DOS 5/6 bootdisk and enable CD-ROM support by loading OAKCDROM drivers and then switch to the CD drive and COPY the cd rom contents to your C:\ drive. Once that is done, run setup.exe from the WIN98 directory you copied.
Oh and to install the drivers copy the SOFTPAQs and ROMPAQs to a CD and then insert the CD and copy the drivers from the CD to C:\DRIVERS and run them using the RUN prompt.
The computer came with an installation cd that does all that stuff automatically. It runs off Compaq's bootloader. I'd put in a picture to show you, but thanks to the web filter here, there's no where I can host the images...
Tom, thanks for the link. I downloaded the program, and now I just need to figure out where to find a floppy disc… Maybe my school's tech department will have one. I doubt it, though: the tech guy here gave me a Gateway 400VTX for free "because it was too old".
I saw that you want to install Linux. First, you have said that the RAM is broken. Why not buy one on eBay? Also, for Linux, Debian Etch has the floppy disk image for you. Just set the mirror to
http://archive.debian.org/debian/ .One thing-I recommend you to upgrade the hard disk as well. That was all the advice I can give, for I am also a beginner on Linux-I know how to use, but not sure how to install. Good luck!
What did the tech guy do, throw it on the floor? Hinge, flicker, and HDD error all point to that. If so, that's bad for a laptop
I looked into it, and sure enough, it needs the HDD to do anything, as part of the BIOS is supposed to be on it. Crazy Compaq! [Dell is better.] So yeah, you can get the disks and install the BIOS and all that. But if it was thrown on the floor, the HDD is probably broken and you'd waste your time installing anything on it, most likely. For old hard drives or floppy disks, eBay is the way to go.
this is what actually happens during boot, assuming you can see. I took it with Cheese, and my webcam isn't exactly HD.
UPDATE:
I turned on the computer so that I could take a picture of it with it's splash screen (for my picture of my computer collection), and let it run (forgetting that I had the BIOS update floppy and the Compaq system restore disc in it), and found that it entered the Compaq System Restore setup and ran without a hitch! THEN it ran the BIOS update without a problem. When I turned it on, it started Windows 95 without a problem.
I don't know how it happened, but I'm very happy.
Oh, that's nice then. And yeah, that was a pretty rough video
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