First post, by Lara
hello, just reaching out to anyone with this machine (Compaq LTE Elite 4/75C) that may have some advice please.
i have a dead battery, dead hard disk and dead floppy. i will get back to these issues later.
i was hoping to get the system back to factory spec as much as possible.
after a few days of researching and testing i have run out of ideas as this machine has a few traps to overcome.
i have an IDE to SDCARD adaptor. after some stuffing around i was able to get it working with a 4GB sd card. (kind of)
following some guides online i used a virtual machine mount with a physical disk to get around no floppy and install dos 6.22, which booted.
i was then able to install windows 3.1 after copying an extracted installer to the SD card.
this demonstrated that the process seems to work ok. but ultimately i would like to try restore all factory spec software.
there are a few image dumps on archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/lte-elite-475-cx/
https://archive.org/details/compaqlteelite475 … xwindows3.1.7z/
https://archive.org/details/compaq-diag-pack/
the images when transferred to the sd\disk seem to have a 4mb OEM partition and COMPAQ main partition.
and this is where i am getting suck, reproducing this or getting it to boot without an error.
i have not been able to confirm what software versions the Compaq LTE Elite 4/75C runs exactly but i did learn the bios software runs of a floppy\drive program which makes things more difficult.
both images above did not boot to windows or dos. but did show the F1 and F10 option which means something is working different to the first fresh single partition install (F1 only).
my guess is there may be a partition config issue or conflict with the ide\sd card. the images wont boot from a VM either so they may be a clue?
i am out of ideas now on how to proceed and hope someone can share some advice to get the images to boot or find oem info.
as a lot of the guides and info on this machine are quiet old and missing bits and pieces, i would hopefully like to write an updated reference guide of my experience and process if i can get this going.
thanks