Hello,

I hope this is an appropriate forum to post questions like this, I‘m very new to retro computing and am not sure where to get help.

So I bought an old Compaq without HDD. It should run Windows 98 SE but I can’t get either a CF card nor an HDD formatted to start installing. CF card is 8GB, IDE 60GB. Both are recognised in BIOS as 8GB drives.

What happens is:

- I insert a dos formatted boot floppy and the unformatted drive
- format the drive with format
- reboot as instructed

The laptop will now refuse to boot from any floppy disk as long as the HDD is connected. It will start reading the floppy but remain at the „booting from floppy disk“ screen until I reset the laptop. If I remove the drive, it will boot from the floppy just fine but since I can‘t insert the HDD after booting into CLI I can’t run Fdisk. I tried EZ drive but no luck, it will ask for a dos formatted floppy but then fail to finish partitioning.

My only tool to try and get this to work is a Windows 10 laptop, one of those Lenovo ones that don‘t let you boot from CD.

Does anyone have an idea how to fix the boot issue?
BTW I thought it might be the CMOS battery somehow, but removing that did not fix the issue.
Talking about CMOS batteries, when I start the laptop loading BIOS takes about 5 minutes. Also the laptop won’t even try booting from the floppy disk until I loaded BIOS once and exit with or without saving.

Alternatively if I could use a VM to get that IDE drive or CF drive formatted to just plug it into the laptop and start installing drivers I’d do that. … assuming the Lenovo supports virtualisation, haven’t checked yet.