I bought a Compaq LTE 5100 that came without a drive. I got a replacement caddy from an Armada and the drive is recognized in BIOS (60GB drive, listed as 8GB as expected).
What I have:
- a stack of floppies
- external floppy drive
- IDE to USB adapter
- a WinXP SP2 laptop (Dell)
- Win98 SE boot floppy image
- Win98 SE installation CD image
I don't have a USB PCMCIA card yet so I can't use CDROM with the Compaq.
What I did:
- delete partitions from IDE drive with fdisk from Win98 floppy
- recreate active 8GB primary partition
- plug the drive into the Dell
- It demands formatting, so I format it as Fat32 with DOS boot files and copy over Win98 setup
- reboot Dell from the IDE drive and run Win98 Setup seemingly successfully
- reboot as required, "invalid system disk" appears, presumably because it's not bootable? (same error if I copy over the DOS boot files from the boot floppy but I didn't expect that to work)
- plug it into the Compaq for good measure, "disk I/O error, replace disk" - I assume this is basically the same error? Or could this mean that while the drive caddy seems to work, it's actually faulty?
For the record, CHKDSK can't find any issues with the IDE drive.
Does anyone have some ideas? that USB card will arrive in the mail eventually but I hoped to make progress on this this weekend...
Alright, so I ran fdisk on the drive to create a new primary partition, this worked fine. It requested a reboot but I had to pull the plug because this laptop won't let me get back to A:.
Now I tried to boot from the diskette again but found that format is not actually on there - copied it over from the Win98 boot CD.
Next issue: The laptop cannot boot from floppy while the HDD is connected (It just freezes on "booting from floppy"), so I have to boot and connect the drive after. The drive is not detected now though, so I can't format it. Any idea how to evade that?
I guess I can try to do this stuff in a Windows 98 VM...
PS: The laptop won't try to boot into anything until I loaded the BIOS once, hit "save & exit" and then ignore the BIOS prompt. Maybe that's all related... I can't imagine that being normal.
Regarding the issue, to clarify the drive issues: round 1:
- I disconnect the HDD
- boot the floppy
- A:> prompt appears
- I connect the HDD
- I can run fdisk on the HDD
- reboot prompt
- unplug laptop to restart
round 2:
- I leave the HDD connected
- try to boot the floppy but it freezes
- unplug the laptop
- disconnect HDD
- now boot from floppy
- A:> appears
- I connect the HDD
- format can't find a drive when I try to run "format c: /s"
Regarding Ontrack & EZ-Drive: Ontrack won't write floppies, insists that I need to close the write protection hole (open or closed makes no difference)
EZ-Drive: I can start ez.exe, start the process but when it asks for a DOS system disk (I used Disk 1 & 2 of MS DOS 6.22) it tells me it can't read a sector on A: and fails. I tried three of my four working floppies for this. I write the images onto the disks with "rawwritewin" which seemed to work perfectly fine for the EZ-Drive floppy.
During my last attempt EZ-Drive couldn't find the HDD at all. I'll try to figure out how to evade that tomorrow.