Compaq Presario 4122

[Dokken]

I picked up a Compaq Presario 4122 Pentium from 1996 from an estate sale for cheap last weekend. It is a little new for my tastes in retro computers, but it is an interesting looking machine and it was only $20 with matching VGA monitor, monitor speakers, and keyboard.



It powers on fine and goes through post/boot, and it booted to the hard drive once to Win98. I had tried to image the drive before turning it on using macrium reflect, but the image will not write back to a new drive (unknown error) and now the computer will not boot to it after the first time. I'm assuming it was on it's last leg.

I do not have the restore disks.

I tried following this person's great instructions:

Compaq Presario 4112

A detailed log of my journey restoring my late grandfather's Compaq Presario 4112.

www.ssterling.net

...but he is working on a model 4112. it looks exactly the same, same vintage, but I cannot get the restore disk he points to to recognize my machine's serial number...it points me to a different compaq part number for the restore disk.

I owned many PCs during this time period and I don't remember ever encountering the EZDrive he talks about. Some type of BIOS deal to allow for larger drives?

I'd love to get this thing restored back to Win95 or 98 (larger HD support?) with all of the compaq doodads and control buttons working. But I guess short of that, simply a fresh clean OS install. what does this EZDrive do and does it limit my options? any advice on how to proceed?

 

[twolazy]

These drives have the bios program on them , in a strange format partition. Try Clonezilla, or even Ghost, or any other program that will do a binary 1:1 clone. I used to use Ghost on these with 0 problems.

And yes EZDrive was a program that used translation software for bigger drives on older machines. If you do use this, make sure it boots that first, before you try to use a boot floppy or the hdd will not see the partitions correctly.

 

[Dokken]

Well, after many tries, I got it to restore from the restore CD/floppy combo. trick was there's a program on the diag boot floppy (required in combination with the restore CD) called uiabomwr.exe. this sets the drive type for the ezdrive apparently. the tables I found had three options for this ID and the second one started the restore with no serial number required.

what a pain. but everything seems to work.

this is restored to the original spinning drive for now.

 

[Dokken]

Final glamor shot with monitor, speakers, and plastic stand bits. it is quite a sizable beast. only thing missing is a Compaq PS2 ball mouse, but I'm sure I have some of those in my mouse bin.

also, just noticed there's a pentium-specific forum, shoulda posted there.