Those cases were a royal PITA to work with! Pretty cool rig though. Any plans for video/sound/networking?

Also dat Optiplex tower <3

Come across plenty of PC's with same amount of dust, proves it was a good honest work horse.
Not sure mine come out so clean the other side though.

Any idea what it was used for? looks pretty much stock.

Those cases were a royal PITA to work with!

I figured that out quickly, there isn't much in here that isn't proprietary.

Any idea what it was used for?

Have no idea, I think the original hard drive is shot but I'll have to pull it out and plug it into the IDE USB adapter to see if there's anything interesting left or if it's even accessible.

Yeah. those power supplies don't come cheap!

That's one of those old compaq models that were controversial for misleading customers in the day right? Not too surprised that it was junked.

Very nice. I have one that is identical. Do you mind making copies of the QuickRestore discs and hosting them somewhere like archive.org?? I have been trying to find them forever, because like an idiot I threw mine away over a decade ago.

Edit, nevermind, I just saw that you already uploaded it to archive.org. Thank You!

Yep, gotcha covered! Would have imaged the floppy too but it seems to have fallen to bit rot unfortunately.

The floppies can still be downloaded. I found them in several places around the web with a Google search. They're an Exe file that needs to be ran on Windows 9x or DOS which generates the floppy disk. I think I searched for "Compaq Presario 9232 Drivers" to find them.

Forgot that!

leileilol wrote:

That's one of those old compaq models that were controversial for misleading customers in the day right? Not too surprised that it was junked.

Wait, what did they do to "mislead consumers?" Genuinely curious, haven't heard this.

Here's mine. 😁

I know this is an old thread but perhaps someone with experience with the 9232 can help. What is the keystroke(s) needed to enter the BIOS? I've tried F1, ESC, F10 F12, and Delete to no avail.

Thanks,
John

leileilol wrote:

That's one of those old compaq models that were controversial for misleading customers in the day right? Not too surprised that it was junked.

Compaqs are generally quite robust systems compared with some other OEMs.

jaevans wrote:

I know this is an old thread but perhaps someone with experience with the 9232 can help. What is the keystroke(s) needed to enter the BIOS? I've tried F1, ESC, F10 F12, and Delete to no avail.

Thanks,
John

F10 if it has the small set up partition. If that doesn't work you need to get the SoftPak off HPs ftp site.

Thanks. That explains my predicament. I obtained this without ram or hard drive so I installed a spare old IDE drive I had. I did install the SP and was able to run it. I may try to put a generic win95 install on it so i can at least get to the optical drive in order to install from the Recovery CD.

Take care,
john

Good to see you have progress. A boot disk for Bootdisk.com should provide you with Dos CD rom support to access the CD driveto install Win95.

Installing Windows 95 from my own set of floppies works, but.... 1) as someone mentioned before, the Quickrestore CD from archive.org is bad so I can't use it to restore to factory. It would be nice to boot a CD to install a Linux distro but that I haven't figured out yet. That is why I was hoping there was a keystroke or sequence to get into the BIOS, but not this 9232. 2) one post mentions boot floppy images available online but I've not located those. Perhaps they have since vanished.

Thanks much to all,
john

You can use an older Version of the PLOP boot disk to boot a CD on basicly any system back to a 486. You can prepare a drive in another system to boot on your Compaq. You can put the Win9x installation files on the hdd in another system and run the installation routine on the Compaq. The SoftPak for your system should be on the HP ftp server. Plenty of options to get the system up and running.

Thanks caluser2000,

Plop looks to be the perfect solution for me at this time. I think I have some spare USB expansion cards that I could install as well so Win95 OSR2.5 should help with that.

I'm really spending too much time on this system. One option is for me to just use the case and see if an old BigBoard II board will fit in there.

Thanks again,
john