Help with a Presario CDS 720

[afternoondelete]

Hi everyone -- I'm a(n extremely green) newbie to the hobby hoping to get some help restoring a Compaq PC, any help would be appreciated.

I purchased a Compaq Presario CDS 720 on Craigslist last month, and it arrived in great condition, updated memory, Win 3.1 and various applications pre-installed. One day, abruptly on booting, I received the 1782 Disk Controller Failure error message. Because I am a dumb newbie, I just pressed every button that it gave me the option to press until something happened -- namely, F3 to save settings (if I remember correctly), making it impossible to boot the computer at all.

I opened it up, checked the IDE connection, all of the hardware looks fine and in place. So now I'm attempting to restore the computer from scratch, using disk images of the Quick Restore utility. I created a floppy disk that seems to be working fine, but for this model the floppy and CD need to work in tandem, and I can't seem to get the computer to recognize the CD-R that I've burned of the Quick Restore .iso (both files are from here: https://archive.org/details/compaqcds_quick_res_disks)

Specifically, this is what happens when I boot the computer with the floppy and CD loaded -- it simply stops at this screen:



Then, if I CTRL-ALT-DEL, it *fails* to recognize the CD drive, and prompts me to make sure the Quick Restore disc is in the tray.





Once I press any key, it kicks me to the dir for the floppy drive, where I can't do anything useful.



Does anyone have any suggestions for what the issue might be here, or why I can't get it to recognize the CD? Is it possible that I'm burning the CD incorrectly? I'm using PowerISO on an older Dell laptop at the slowest speed available (10x). I've created numerous CDs to ensure that I'm doing it correctly, but I'm still not 100 percent sure I'm adding the correct boot image file to the disc (there's the .ima file that I loaded to the floppy, and also a file with a ".01" extension in the "BOOTDISK" directory on the CD .iso). Any guidance would be appreciated, thanks.

 

[maferv]

Hey! Welcome to the forum!

What do you exactly want to load into the computer? MS-DOS 6.22? You could load it from floppies (it only takes 3).
Maybe you could remove the hard disk and copy the proprietary Compaq utilities on a different computer.

Regarding your CD drive problem, I'd give FreeDOS a try, since it automatically auto-detects and tests many CD-ROM drivers upon boot. It should at least detect it and load the appropriate driver. You could try the floppy version but it would be better if you install the full version on a different computer, since it would have all the drivers. I'm not sure the floppy version includes them all.

If it is still not detected, I'd say your CD drive is the problem. Check if it gets the appropriate voltage and if you can try it on a different computer.

Good luck!

 

[T-R-A]

Sadly, older optical drives (more often CD's than DVD's) have problems with "burned" media. Sometimes it takes no more than trying different brands; sometimes it just doesn't happen.

As mentioned, it could also mean that the drive is no longer able to read any CD-ROM (for whatever reason).

 

[twolazy]

Make sure you arent using an 80 wire IDE cable. Had nothing but issues with my old compaq presario 486 and newer 80 wire cables. Replaced with a 40 wire and 0 issues.