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Boot from floppy on a Compaq Contura 430C

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First post, by Strahssis

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Hi there,

I'm trying to replace the hard drive with a CF to IDE-adapter on a Compaq Contura 430C. I'm using a generic 512MB card that worked fine on my Olivetti Philos 48. On my other laptops this was a simple task, but on this one I seem to be unable to boot from a floppy, so I can't install any OS on the new card. I suspect it automatically tries to boot from a hard drive. It doesn't matter if there is anything on there or not: when I have the old hard drive in there it boots to Windows 95 and when the compact flash card is in there it boots to a blank screen with a cursor and gets stuck there. Only when I remove the compact flash card, I'm able to boot from a floppy, but there's no point of doing that, since I can't install DOS 6.22 anyways without a hard drive inserted. When the original hard drive is in there however, I can boot from a floppy by pressing the delete key when powering it on.

This wouldn't be all that much of a problem if I could go in the BIOS to change the boot order, but after some research online I found out this laptop doesn't have a BIOS, so I have no idea how I can change the boot order then. I did flash the latest 1999 ROMpaq on there, though I'm not sure anymore what that is for if there is no BIOS. I even tried a desperate caveman's method by turning it on without the hard drive and connect the hard drive as soon as it starts booting from the floppy. This won't work either because this way the setup won't detect the drive. Changing the jumper settings didn't work either: then it won't detect any hard drive at all. Cloning the old hard drive is also impossible since my USB hard drive reader doesn't want to read it for some reason.

I have seen one success story from someone with a Compaq Contura 400 series online, but there are no details on how he achieved that. I'm really out of ideas right now, so please help me! Thank you guys so much in advance!

Sincerely,

Miko, Strahssis

Mimi: AMD K6-2/266, S3 Trio64, Diamond Monster 3D II, Sound Blaster CT2800, 32MB RAM
Satellite 220CS: Pentium 133, SVGA DSTN, Sound Blaster Pro, 64MB RAM
Contura 420CX: 486DX4 75, VGA TFT, Roland Serial MIDI, 16MB RAM

Reply 1 of 7, by brian105

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There obviously should be a BIOS. Have you tried every key? F2, escape, F10 is a popular one Compaq used, etc.

Presario 5284: K6-2+ 550 ACZ @ 600 2v, 256MB PC133, GeForce4 MX 440SE 64MB, MVP3, Maxtor SATA/150 PCI card, 16GB Sandisk U100 SATA SSD
2007 Desktop: Athlon 64 X2 6000+, Asus M2v-MX SE, Foxconn 7950GT 512mb, 4GB DDR2 800, Audigy 2 ZS, WinME/XP

Reply 2 of 7, by Strahssis

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Well, only when the original hard drive is in there, you can enter a setup utility by pressing F10, but you can't do much there. There's no function to change the boot order in the utility. The only thing that might be useful is the option to change the hard drive type, cylinders, heads, etc. However, even if that would lead to a solution somehow, I still wouldn't know what to fill in there. 😒

Mimi: AMD K6-2/266, S3 Trio64, Diamond Monster 3D II, Sound Blaster CT2800, 32MB RAM
Satellite 220CS: Pentium 133, SVGA DSTN, Sound Blaster Pro, 64MB RAM
Contura 420CX: 486DX4 75, VGA TFT, Roland Serial MIDI, 16MB RAM

Reply 3 of 7, by brian105

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Does it have a CD drive? Maybe you can boot off of a Windows 95/98 install disc and see if the CF pops up there as a usable device.

Presario 5284: K6-2+ 550 ACZ @ 600 2v, 256MB PC133, GeForce4 MX 440SE 64MB, MVP3, Maxtor SATA/150 PCI card, 16GB Sandisk U100 SATA SSD
2007 Desktop: Athlon 64 X2 6000+, Asus M2v-MX SE, Foxconn 7950GT 512mb, 4GB DDR2 800, Audigy 2 ZS, WinME/XP

Reply 4 of 7, by Strahssis

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Unfortunately it doesn't. Thank you for helping me find a solution though, it is much appreciated!

Mimi: AMD K6-2/266, S3 Trio64, Diamond Monster 3D II, Sound Blaster CT2800, 32MB RAM
Satellite 220CS: Pentium 133, SVGA DSTN, Sound Blaster Pro, 64MB RAM
Contura 420CX: 486DX4 75, VGA TFT, Roland Serial MIDI, 16MB RAM

Reply 5 of 7, by Jo22

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My Compaq Contura 400c had its CMOS setup on a hidden HDD partition..
However, I was able to find images of the Setup/Diagnostic software on Compaq/HP servers once.
By using these, I was able to create a disk set which allowed to boot into the Compaq software and optionally, re-create that hidden partition.

I still have the disk images, maybe they will also work on the 430c, not sure. 😀

Edit: I once metioned that in another thread here at vogons..
Re: SD/CF to ide CHS setup

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 6 of 7, by Strahssis

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Sorry for my delayed reply and thank you for your help Jo22! Could you please send me the images? The Contura 400C and 430C are similar in many ways, so maybe these images are compatible. I can't wait to try this! 😀

Mimi: AMD K6-2/266, S3 Trio64, Diamond Monster 3D II, Sound Blaster CT2800, 32MB RAM
Satellite 220CS: Pentium 133, SVGA DSTN, Sound Blaster Pro, 64MB RAM
Contura 420CX: 486DX4 75, VGA TFT, Roland Serial MIDI, 16MB RAM

Reply 7 of 7, by halls_well

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Strahssis wrote on 2020-06-15, 19:33:

Sorry for my delayed reply and thank you for your help Jo22! Could you please send me the images? The Contura 400C and 430C are similar in many ways, so maybe these images are compatible. I can't wait to try this! 😀

Hi, I'm sorry to necro a thread but I have an original hard drive in my Compaq Contura 420cx and have imaged it. I have a dd-created image of the utils partition, as well as the executables. I will attach the executables here, hopefully that's kosher. Let me know if you want the image as opposed to just the exe's.

On the off chance you have it, I found this thread by searching for BIOS updates for this machine - I want to try to use a larger CF card than 2GB, which seems to be the limit currently 😁

Thanks!

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