Thank you es1s for the amazing archive link at the in the Compaq LTE Lite Bios thread I wanted to add to the knowledge base. Check out the other LTE Lite thread on how to download all the original softpaqs from the archives....

DO NOT USE THIS PROCEDURE ON THE COMPAQ LTE Lite. The Lite apparently does NOT support compactflash!!! and will physically damage the motherboard. I do not have personal experience with this. I have started this new thread specifically to separate the procedure from the Lites.

**** FOR COMPAQ LTE ELITE 4/50cx - NOT LITE ****

I needed to run a bios update but the floppy drive was completely dead on this series.

The LTE Elite I have has a CF-IDE adapter and I have a separate machine (toshiba 460cdt with floppy & cd & CF-IDE).

On the 460cdt (working machine)

1) format a bootable cf card with Msdos (I used 6.22) and a 16 mb CF card

2) Extract the softpaq onto a floppy drive (mine was SP5989- system rom date 12-23-97) by running the disk creator

3) Copy the contents of the floppy onto the CF card. The floppy seems to run a different version of dos but I can confirm that it is ok with 6.22 for me anyways.

The new rom was Comapio0.b97 on the floppy

I edited the config.sys on the CF card to remove/rem out the shell = a:\rompaq.exe command as I didn't want it to crash in the LTE Elite

4) put the CF into the LTE Elite and boot up into dos

I ran rompaq.exe and it recognized the laptop; made a backup file (called it campio0.6f3) and then flashed the upgrade.

The upgrade screen is a bit of nail biter and took ~ 3 min (no counter, no response). The message on the screen is that it should only take a few "seconds" but really, they should have said minutes.

After that, it confirmed the update. keyboard was dead at this point so a hard power cycle was required.

System now boot up and presumably on the new bios (how can we check?)

Hope this helps

** I have archived/attached the ORIGINAL bios that came with my 4/50cx (rom date 7-19-95). This is NOT the softpaq/update version and is archived here for interest sake in case there is an unexpected need in the future **