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Am I doing something wrong?

I would return the machine as well. Did you download the Compaq Softpaq bios floppy and set the correct parameters in the bios?

I have a portable II. I bought it from a junk seller on ebay.. I should have returned it.. IT is a terribly finicky beast. The power supply is a nightmare. Im not sure if yours has the same configuration mine did but it came with a winchester hard drive controller (mfm) and a compaq daughterboard to convert it to early IDE . The drive was a 20mb ide and mine too was dead. I was able to get a 127mb 2.5" old lapter hard drive to work in it (using only 109MB, but good enough) there are alot of things that could go wrong with what you are explaining.
 
VERAULT said:
I would return the machine as well. Did you download the Compaq Softpaq bios floppy and set the correct parameters in the bios?
Click to expand...

From his earlier posts, unfortunately he doesn't have another computer with a 5 1/4 floppy drive (not clear if it's no drive, or just no 360k drives). With that machine, there really is almost nothing you can do if you don't have a way to make (or test) a floppy disk.
 
Drive A & B

Drive A & B

I have the SETUP.EXE file and can create the SETUP Floppy. Which version DOS are you wanting to
get floppy's of?

I finally found a picture of the Compaq showing exactly which drive is A: & (B: OR C:).

Larry

Compaq.jpg
 
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So, I’m usually knee-deep in MicroChannel, and what I’ve learned trying to configure these might be helpful here. Pull everything until you have a basic configuration that works, and from there add one piece at a time.

Remove all cards but the floppy controller. Including the CF card.

Set the bios with no hard disk, and the appropriate floppy size.

Let’s see if you can coax it to a dos prompt. After you’ve got everything set up, put your dos disk in and start her up. If we get to dos, at least we know there’s not a major problem with the floppy drive or the machine.
 
Ok, a few more thoughts:

The eBeh auction does seem to show the machine booted from a floppy. If it not something loose, then it seems just a little odd that it is not working.

A couple more things to check - I don't know how hard it is to access the drive heads in that unit (The regular compaq portable is a pain), but it would be a good test to manually move the drive head towards the center of the drive, and see if it seeks track zero at boot. That would show it is not frozen, and give a better indication that the controller is properly talking to the drive.

There is also the slight chance that it might have been exposed to magnetic fields during shipping, erasing the disks. I've never seen that happen, and I'd expect physical damage or incorrect formatting is more likely. Either way, I'd suggest obtaining a known good boot 360k floppy from somewhere.

You might be able to attach a 1.44mb floppy drive to the controller, and at least use 720k disks.

A CF card that is accessible from a boot disk but not bootable suggests the seller just formatted the drive on another computer and moved it to this one. That probably means the expected geometry does not match what this machine expects, hence the non-system disk error. But DOS booted from a floppy will usually figure out how to read it anyway. Even moving between different XT-IDEs can suffer from that problem. In other words, I suspect the CF stuff is technically fine. It's just goofy, and FDISKing it properly would probably get it to work.... but you need to get those boot floppies working.

When dealing with finicky equipment - even for "modern" stuff - it is usually a good idea to have some kind of alternate/backup/tweener system for testing purposes and sanity checking. So time to start your hoard :) Before you known it, you will be up to your neck in beautiful beige boxes, floppy disks, CRTs, ISA cards, and cables. :p
 
Mark,
So, what's you game plan? You want me to create a SETUP DISK? And the CDOS31-1.DSK, CDOS31-2.DSK, C2SETUP.DSK Floppy Images?
Or MSDOS 3.xx, MSDOS 6.22, MSDOS 7.1, FREEDOS?

My guess is the Battery doesn't retain the setup when power is off, so you lost the SETUP information, and it will happen until the battery is replaced.
My NAS has an old Motherboard, and it does the same thing, except it does boot after depressing the F1 Key.

Let me know. I'm going to write the .DSK images and verify my .RAW images I've created from the .DSK images.

Larry
 
I have the following that boot:

COMPAQ DIAGNOSTICS
VERSION 8.00 REVISION B
071891 PT. #128205-002
360K DISKETTE 1
Copyright 1985,1992 Compaq Computer Corporation

DIAG800B._01 (I named this SETUP1, and created SETUP1.IMD, and SETUP1.RAW) This image boots on my DOS BOX as SETUP Disk.


COMPAQ DIAGNOSTICS
VERSION 8.00 REVISION B
071891 PT. #128205-002
360K DISKETTE 2
Copyright 1985,1992 Compaq Computer Corporation

DIAG800B._02 (I named this SETUP2, and created SETUP2.IMD, and SETUP2.RAW) This image boots on my DOS BOX as TEST Disk.

I also have the following:
CDOS31-1.DSK - This image boots on my DOS BOX. I think this floppy ask for the date and time in German.
CDOS31-1.IMD - I created the following:
CDOS31-1.RAW
CDOS31-1.TXT

CDOS31-2.DSK - This image boots on my DOS BOX.
CDOS31-2.IMD - I created the following:
CDOS31-2.RAW
CDOS31-2.TXT

CP2SETUP.DSK - This image boots on my DOS BOX. Version 5.05
CP2SETUP.IMD - I created the following:
CP2SETUP.RAW
CP2SETUP.TXT

I still think I'd try DOS 6.22 or DOS 7.1 from Win 98.

What Floppy's you want packaged and mailed?

Larry
 
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