Compaq Armada 4220T

[marc.hull]

I pulled this off the shelf in the hopes of making a WIN98 Machine to send to someone who needs one. It had Linux on it so I reformatted the disk and installed DOS from a WIN 98 Start up disk and now have an issue and a quandary...

Issue: Pressing F10 during boot does not enter the BIOS set up as advertised. Is there a different key I need to use. The BIOS battery is completely dead so I imagine it needs attention but until I figure out how to get to the set up screen I am most definitely dead in the water.

Quandry: This machine has no CD rom. How in the world am I going to install WIN98 on the thing if there is no CD ROM ? How did anyone install on this thing without a CD ROM? It has a floppy but I don't think WIN98 will fit on one (ore 20.)

Any ideas ?

PS. I believe this machine has a pentium I in it (MMX 266MHZ from the specs) so I "think" I'm on topic. If not then my apologies and feel free to boot me to another thread.

 

[SpidersWeb]

No doubt an external CDROM was available. Might be worth checking ebay to see if you can find something to suit.

What I'd be doing is use another machine to make a Win98 start disk and copy the contents of the CDROM using a serial cable. Then install direct from the hard drive. I don't have step by step instructions here, just hoping that gives you something to look in to.

 

[High_Treason]

Hmm, I had to work on one of these years ago and faced the same problem, I can't remember how to get into the BIOS beyond whichever key/key combo it was only worked at a certain time during post. All I can suggest there is to try common key combos (F1, F2, F3, Del, F10, Ctrl Alt Esc, Ctrl Alt Ins, etc...) and hope one of them works.

As for the Windows issue, I took the drive out and put it in another machine. I then formatted it with DOS and copied the WIN98 directory from the CD to the drive before putting the drive back in the Compaq and running setup that way... When I did it the drives were not large enough for Win98, that was annoying, so watch out for that.

 

[RWallmow]

The BIOS setup is NOT in ROM on a lot of these 2000ish "era" Compaqs and older Compaqs.
Many of the Compaq machines had a BIOS partition on the hard drive, if the hard drive is wiped clean you will need the BIOS config disk. The F10 for setup option only works if that BIOS partition is on the drive.

As for CD & loading windows, I want to say there was a docking station for that model with an IDE CD-ROM internal, would have been bootable. Not having that I would say look into a PCMCIA network card and "Bart's Network Boot Disk", boot from that and map a network drive to another PC and share the windows 98 CD from that, copy all its files to the hard drive and run setup. Another option would be remove the hard drive, put it in a machine with CD-ROM, copy windows install files to it, then put HD back in the Armada and run setup from the hard disk.

EDIT: I see I was beat to this option by High_Treason

 

[marc.hull]

The BIOS setup is NOT in ROM on a lot of these 2000ish "era" Compaqs and older Compaqs.
Many of the Compaq machines had a BIOS partition on the hard drive, if the hard drive is wiped clean you will need the BIOS config disk. The F10 for setup option only works if that BIOS partition is on the drive.

As for CD & loading windows, I want to say there was a docking station for that model with an IDE CD-ROM internal, would have been bootable. Not having that I would say look into a PCMCIA network card and "Bart's Network Boot Disk", boot from that and map a network drive to another PC and share the windows 98 CD from that, copy all its files to the hard drive and run setup. Another option would be remove the hard drive, put it in a machine with CD-ROM, copy windows install files to it, then put HD back in the Armada and run setup from the hard disk.

EDIT: I see I was beat to this option by High_Treason

That appears to be the case (bios on a HDD partition.) Wonder why it has a battery ? I have found a copy of the diagnostic disk on the web and I'll see what that does for me. BTW when DOS was loaded I was only getting a report of 39MB of HDD storage but the specs call for a 4 GB HDD. Would this be a function of the DOS 6.xx or could the drive be hosed ?

Adventuring on ......

 

[Stone]

DOS 6.xx can see 8.4 GB but only 2 GB per partition. Is your 4 GB drive all in one partition? That is except for the BIOS partition which just might be 39 MB and is what DOS 6.xx is now seeing.

 

[marc.hull]

DOS 6.xx can see 8.4 GB but only 2 GB per partition. Is your 4 GB drive all in one partition? That is except for the BIOS partition which just might be 39 MB and is what DOS 6.xx is now seeing.

I really don't know. I would doubt it as the drive had been reformatted at some point with Linux installed on it. I deleted all the partitions before I found out I needed the set up partition (par for the course.)

The disk I found is just another DOS disk so I am still stuck at ground zero with Google kicking my butt. Anyone know where the diagnostics and set up disks for the 4220T are located ?

 

[RWallmow]

I really don't know. I would doubt it as the drive had been reformatted at some point with Linux installed on it. I deleted all the partitions before I found out I needed the set up partition (par for the course.)

The disk I found is just another DOS disk so I am still stuck at ground zero with Google kicking my butt. Anyone know where the diagnostics and set up disks for the 4220T are located ?

I'd check out hp.com drivers/downloads section. They should have Compaq downloads archived.

 

[MikeS]

That appears to be the case (bios on a HDD partition.) Wonder why it has a battery ?

The BIOS data is kept in battery-backed CMOS memory as usual; the hidden partition contains (contained ;-) )the setup and diagnostic programs.

BTW when DOS was loaded I was only getting a report of 39MB of HDD storage but the specs call for a 4 GB HDD. Would this be a function of the DOS 6.xx or could the drive be hosed ?

I'd wait until you've confirmed the correct drive type/size in the BIOS configuration.

Setup/Diagnostic disk (SP6548 ):
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...eriesId=96225&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=20

 

[Stone]

Marc, have you tried running one of the generic setup programs like AT Advanced Diagnostics, GSetup Or one I like to use, Setupnu? They all basically do the same thing -- access/configure the CMOS settings through a program you run from a diskette.

 

[RWallmow]

Marc, have you tried running one of the generic setup programs like AT Advanced Diagnostics, GSetup Or one I like to use, Setupnu? They all basically do the same thing -- access/configure the CMOS settings through a program you run from a diskette.

That will do the basic stuff like disks, clock, etc.. but the actual Compaq utility which is still readily available from HP does some extras like COM/LPT port config, sound card IRQ/IO, Modem Config, that kind of stuff, which the "generic" setups will not be able to do for it. Might as well use the right tool for the job when that tool is easily readily available, plus the Compaq one should allow you to re-install it to the hidden partition of the drive so you can make the F10 for BIOS option work again.

 

[marc.hull]

So I got the disk (thank you) and got a bootable copy of it made. It claims it has a conflict with the system board but gives me the option to ignore so I poked around a bit. I tried to install the config software but it complained about there not being a diagnostic partition and says us a copy of PC Diagnostics to create the partition. Don't have a copy of PC Diagnostics but that can come later what was really trippy was this.

I inadvertently booted without a floppy and the damn Linux load screen came up. I am pretty sure A reformat would wipe that out unless it is protected somehow. There is a jumper on the HDD but I assumed it was slave/master. Is it possible to protect some HDD contents with a jumper ?

 

[Stone]

I inadvertently booted without a floppy and the damn Linux load screen came up. I am pretty sure A reformat would wipe that out unless it is protected somehow.

When you format you only format one partition at a time. Since the loader is in the boot sector it shouldn't be affected by a format. You would need the software that put it there to remove it.

There is a jumper on the HDD but I assumed it was slave/master. Is it possible to protect some HDD contents with a jumper ?

I don't think so, especially if you're referring to the Linux loader.

 

[marc.hull]

I have gotten the HDD figured out finally. It is a 4GB IBM OEM. Works fine with a DOS partition on the laptop. I have a 3.5 to 2.5 converter that I had to mod a bit in order to create a slave condition for the HDD and put it on my XP machine. The XP machine see's it but thinks it's unformatted. When I try and format it the program gets all the way to the end and says the drive is unformattable (or something to that effect.) I also tried on a WIN98 machine and the bios configure detects there is a drive there but can not make out it's configuration. This has put a damper on copying the WIN 98 CD to the HDD and installing from there. EBAY hasn't yielded a docking station that fits the machine so......

Any other ideas on getting the hard drive to be seen by XP or WIN98 or for that matter on getting an install without a CD ? Magic or a new form of physics would be acceptable... ;-)...

 

[Stone]

The XP machine see's it but thinks it's unformatted.

Then it *isn't* seeing it.

 

[RWallmow]

Any other ideas ... on getting an install without a CD ? Magic or a new form of physics would be acceptable... ;-)...

See my earlier post....

...I would say look into a PCMCIA network card and "Bart's Network Boot Disk", boot from that and map a network drive to another PC and share the windows 98 CD from that, copy all its files to the hard drive and run setup.

Here I will even give you a link to Bart's network boot disk.

I have used this method MANY, MANY times to get OS's installed on CD-less systems like laptops or slim/low end desktops. I was using this method up to fairly modern times even for deploying XP, but now I have moved to PXE/WinPE based deployments of XP/7/8.