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Compaq LTE Software diskettes/images

NeXT

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,178
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
Okay, hear me out...

I picked up a really nice LTE Lite 4/25E on my way back from VCFw (the battery even still holds a five minute charge!) and it still has an intact system partition but someone has blown away the rest of the disk and reinstalled Windows 95. Compaq shipped these with an OEM'd DOS and Windows 3.x install, plus a bunch of extra software that enables the extra fancy features like the dock and Standby/Hibernation. I cannot find recovery diskettes for this machine. The closest I have come so far is a "hard disk image" on the internet archive ( https://archive.org/details/ltecfboot ) but they mention that the system partition is missing and "some random utilities and MSDOS 6.22 in English" leads me to believe this is not a virgin install. I mean I can't complain if there's something but if there is a much cleaner recovery method available I'd rather that instead of surgically picking through someone's drive dump.
 
Hey i found this post by accident, i uploaded that image and yeah it's a random image i made myself because the hard disk was failing, i looked all over, even asked local people that own the same laptop and that was the best i could piece together, haven't found the recovery disks yet, you had any luck with that? i would love to restore this computer to a clean install.
 
Nah I've asked around and so far I've had no luck locating anyone with diskettes. I knew my first machine 20 years ago machine came with them but I have been unable to locate them in my software collection, so they may of been lost.
 
I bought my LTE new in the early 90s at a clearing sale from the distributors here in Oz, I recall it might have been Fujitsu. I used it a lot when I was freelance contracting, it was invaluable with Kermit and as a terminal to clients' Unisys 5000/50s (rebadged NCR Towers) SysVR2 boxes and Xenix/286 on NEC APC IVs, plus Turbo C development of client support software. I made a new floppy drive belt some years ago (described on VCFed) but the machine died after that when I foolishly powered it on and off numerous times in a row trying to get the PSU to start up. I should have looked at that and perhaps re-capped it. Anyway here is my manual and in the PVC slip pouch at the back I found these diskettes. Mostly Utility but a handwritten one is labelled 'Bootable DOS 6'. No idea if any of them are readable but they've only sat on the shelf inside so they might be ok. If this could be of any help I do have a USB floppy drive somewhere which .might work for imaging.
Compaq_LTE_diskettes_20230911.png
 
Since I own an LTE Lite 4/25 as well, I checked my software archive. I have "sp1363_setup.img" in my folder for that. No idea if I ever tested it, but that should be the correct one. Don't have or know about any special version of DOS/Windows for it, however.
 
Gah! I was subscribed to this thread but never got new post notifications for any of you! >_>
Okay see if those diskettes can be imaged. Larry I have seen that HP has a few downloads for the system but they are being incredibly obtuse about each one. Actually that's a three-ring binder. Do you have an ADF you can scan it through?

In the meantime I was given another 4/25 and it has a nearly virgin drive. There's a few customizations and user files I need to sanitize but you start the machine and it sees the system partition, it loads the hibernation drivers and the Windows install is still Compaq customized with the correct display driver and even the trackball utility is present. It looks like someone merely installed Microsoft Works and that was it. I'll have to setup a temporary Linux system to correctly image the drive but then we will have a completely stock disk image anyone can write to their disk and work around a non-functional floppy drive.
 
How are those holding up? The LTE Lites seem to be rather problematic reliability wise. Bad caps, drive belt, and hinge problems.
 
I have three machines now (a 4/20 and two 4/25e's) and while they all show signs of more fragile plastics (I'll include hinges in that) and the mentioned failure of the very tiny belt in the floppy drive they have not yet been recapped but they all work. One even has a battery that still lasts a few minutes. You gotta open them though. There's a backup battery hiding inside that MUST be removed. Uxwbill demonstrated why a few years ago. The models with the active matrix display also exhibit tunnel vision.

Fun thing about the tunnel vision. It's been suggested that the climate the screens are stored in may affect how rapidly the panels degrade. I can say now with evidence that this is true. One of my 4/25's came from the SF bay area and exhibits quite severe tunnel vision after only a few minutes. An identical spec machine (this one that I'm recovering the disk image from) was stored several thousand kilometers north in greater Vancouver where the environment and exposure to the ocean is the same, but the climate is on average cooler and it has considerably less tunnel vision.
 
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TV would only be the case for the E suffix models that have the Hosiden-made grayscale panels, the active color panels would be fine. I know those need caps done though.

Where's the backup battery in them located?

I've run into Tunnel Vision on my PowerBook 540, my 170 doesn't have it.
 
The battery is buried inside the laptop. You will need to remove the keyboard and top assembly to access it, but if you are going in for the hard drive or floppy drive anyways it's right behind the hard drive.
 
So the drive has been cleaned up and sanitized for public imaging but it just clicked on me that somehow I don't have any way to image this drive in a way that it preserves the entire structure of the disk. I'm so used to working with floppy disks or just plugging it into Windows and dragging files over. You'd point at linux and I've not actually used that in well over a decade and thus have nothing available since the Disk-o-Matic is still not running. Under Windows it's not suggested and again I'm aware of no block accurate disk imaging tools specifically for hard disks and on a mac I'm more lost because new macs I've never tried such a task on them.
 
If you haven't got a Linux system setup and your computer can boot from a USB drive, you can still boot into the OS. I would think any machine able to boot Windows 7 should be able to do this. You can use the Knoppix "Live CD" variety of Linux without having to install it to a HD by downloading and writing an image from this web page to a flash drive (or a CD/DVD):

http://knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

More info about Knoppix can be found here:

http://knoppix.net/

If you can boot from a USB or CD/DVD on your computer, then you might try Rescuezilla, a "Live CD" GUI-based disk cloning program:

https://rescuezilla.com/

I haven't used it myself, but it looks like it should be fairly straightforward to use.
 
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