• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Compaq Portable not booting ANYTHING

M

Macmaster2000

Member
Joined
Apr 8, 2016
Messages
34
Location
Georgia, USA
Hello VCF!
I have recently gotten a Compaq Portable i from eBay, but it didn't come with any disks or software. I have tried numerous images that I have found online, and written to a 360k 5 1/4 disk, but not a single one will boot. The farthest I've gotten was a message that the Command Interpreter was missing or corrupt. I don't know why I get that error, I have even replaced the COMMAND.COM manually.
Is there a user who has an image of something that it will boot? I've tried looking on eBay for actual DOS floppies, but no auction that is under $50 gives a detailed description of the auction, and often is untested.

Anyone here able to help me out? :(

(Also I've never posted on this forum before, if this is in the wrong category, I apologize)
 
Welcome to pure vintage madness! :) And congrats on the Compaq Portable.

What are you using to write the 5.25" disks?

If you are attempting to write a 5.25" low density (360K) disk using a high density (1.2mb) drive, you must completely degauss the disk first or it will not work, and even then can be flaky.
 
SomeGuy said:
Welcome to pure vintage madness! :) And congrats on the Compaq Portable.

What are you using to write the 5.25" disks?

If you are attempting to write a 5.25" low density (360K) disk using a high density (1.2mb) drive, you must completely degauss the disk first or it will not work, and even then can be flaky.
Click to expand...

The Compaq had 2, 5 1/4 360K drives, and I took one out and installed it on a newer DOS machine I have, so that I could write images to it. I have setup the BIOS on that machine to the correct parameters of the drive as well.
 
I find 360k disks and drives can be tempramental at times, even when made on different drives in the same system. Just be patient, you'll end up with good disks.
 
Some things that I can think of:

Hardware

* Are you confident that you are using the correct type of floppy? See the 'Incorrect floppies' section at [here].

* Your transplanted 360K drive has yet to be proven good. Among other things, it may not be stepping properly. On old 5.25" drives (unused for many years), the lubrication may have deteriorated. See the 'Deteriorated lubrication' section at [here].

Software

* I know that at least one DOS based disk imaging program requires to run in 'true' DOS in order to propery write. If the program is run in a DOS box within Windows, or run in DOS that is initiated from Windows, the program goes through the motion of writing, but in the background, writing is not happening properly.
 
Are you confident that you are using the correct type of floppy?
Click to expand...
Yes it was an unused box of DS/DD disks.

I know that at least one DOS based disk imaging program requires to run in 'true' DOS in order to properly write.
Click to expand...
I am writing to the disks on a true-DOS machine, running 6.22.
 
What software are you using to write the images?

Try reading the image back in on the DOS 6.22 machine, do you get any read errors?

Exactly what image(s) or DOS version(s) are you trying to write?

Also, how much RAM does the Compaq Portable have?
 
What software are you using to write the images?
Click to expand...
FIRM.COM, that I got from here: http://www.bttr-software.de/freesoft/disk2.htm

Try reading the image back in on the DOS 6.22 machine, do you get any read errors?
Click to expand...
Nope, the image seems fine, I've even used some of them before.

Exactly what image(s) or DOS version(s) are you trying to write?
Click to expand...
I've tried everything from PC-DOS and various versions of MS-DOS.

Also, how much RAM does the Compaq Portable have?
Click to expand...
Not sure, but I assume its the standard 128K that Wikipedia says.

Something I'm going to try is to take the floppy drive that I installed in the newer computer, put it back in the Compaq, and see if it works better.
 
Macmaster2000 said:
Nope, the image seems fine, I've even used some of them before.
Click to expand...
What I meant was read the floppy disk back in to see if there were any unreported write errors. I've encountered that before, where writing a disk will seem to have gone smoothly but in fact the contents were garbled.

If you do switch drives around and reconfigure it to use this drive as "A", try one of the disks you already wrote.

Officially MS-DOS 4.00 and later require 256K, although they may boot with less. For this machine I'd recommend a vanilla MS-DOS 3.30 or the Compaq OEM of 2.x.

Edit: didn't see that last post. Glad to hear you got it going.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top