Ok so for a VERY good price I am now in possesion of a compaq armada 15400 with a cd drive, floppy drive, 2 pcmcia slots a serial port parrallel port
infra red etc etc.
It has a generic ide disc type 65 which is assigned letters C AND? D This I a assuming is a 2 gig hard drive split into a "C" 1.680gig hard
drive and what it also says is a "D"466Mb drive.
Memory is 48Mb
Processor is a pentium(r) w/MMX at 150mhz.
No Usb's or ethernet ports but it does have some compaq ethernet utilities /drivers.
so here's the thing. I got it for the megasquirt tuning and Ideally I'd like to do a disc format and clean install of windows ( i may/will
have an original windows 95 disc somewhere (I presume that xp will be out of the question.
I wondered about a disc format and a clean install of 95 BUT I do not have any of the compaq discs at all and am worried that it's gonna hang
because it's missing compaq info and I'll be fubared. I'm totally pc stupid by any means but get frustrated at the lack of help a pc
gives you when things go wrong.
What are my options??
As always thanks in advance
Gary
I would recommend 95 or 98se not 98me I would be surprised if you cannot get the drivers off of compaq themselves, if not directly from their website
an email to their support people would probably do the trick, failing that they must be on the web somewhere.
What you have on the second partition may be a disk image or a windows recovery/setup system, have a look through any docs on D: or for a setup.exe
this should allow you to reinstall windows from the manufacturers install spec
found this on the website
clicky!
[Edited on 7/2/08 by locogeoff]
98 se is the way forward, just make sure you download all the drivers for it first, being the age it is its not going to have anything to exotic hardware wise, if you struggle for 98se pm me
Yep 98Se is the way to go. One thing to check before you wipe Windows is that the computer can boot from CD --- not every computer of Win95 vintage
can..
466mb partition is probably a recovery partition which should have all the Win95 install files.
Lack of USB port could be a problem a PCMCIA adapter to USB would allow USB networking and serial devices but before buy any card check the Win98se
drivers are available -- most of the cheaper cards might not support 98se. A look through ebuyer customer reviews will give you an idea of what works
on 98se.
If you want to compeletly clear the partitions you use Fdisk or a partition wiping boot disk.
[Edited on 8/2/08 by britishtrident]
quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
Lack of USB port could be a problem a PCMCIA adapter to USB would allow USB networking and serial devices but before buy any card check the Win98se drivers are available -- most of the cheaper cards might not support 98se.
in which case if it turns out not to be boot able from cd rom the best way to get 98se on it would be either copy the files to a directory on the hard
disk and run win98 setup from there or format the disk on a desktop (requires an IDE cable adaptor) and copy the setup files on.
Old PCs are a pain in the neck to do anything major to.
quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
in which case if it turns out not to be boot able from cd rom the best way to get 98se on it would be either copy the files to a directory on the hard disk and run win98 setup from there or format the disk on a desktop (requires an IDE cable adaptor) and copy the setup files on.
Old PCs are a pain in the neck to do anything major to.
quote:
Originally posted by MikeRJ
quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
in which case if it turns out not to be boot able from cd rom the best way to get 98se on it would be either copy the files to a directory on the hard disk and run win98 setup from there or format the disk on a desktop (requires an IDE cable adaptor) and copy the setup files on.
Old PCs are a pain in the neck to do anything major to.
As it has a floppy drive you could simply boot from a floppy and make sure you load HIMEM, the CD ROM driver and MSCDEX. The you have access to the CDROM through DOS. Installed Windows on lots of old laptops this way in the past.