What a neat little computer! I remember seeing that exact machine at Future Shop for $899 CAD back in 1997. I was very tempted to buy one as a secondary machine. At the time I had just blown $2800 on a PII-based Presario 4840. 😲

the bad part is that there are no isa/pci slots at all... but for 4GBP you can't complain 😁

You need to locate the Cyrix "companion" chipset drivers. It is either the Cx5510, 5520, or 5530. Start with locating the Compaq drivers disc. I only have the drivers for the 5530. It contains drivers for UDMA disc access, VGA, and sound.

What speed processor do you got in there? Is it a BGA or pseudo-socket7?

feipoa wrote:

You need to locate the Cyrix "companion" chipset drivers. It is either the Cx5510, 5520, or 5530. Start with locating the Compaq drivers disc. I only have the drivers for the 5530. It contains drivers for UDMA disc access, VGA, and sound.

What speed processor do you got in there? Is it a BGA or pseudo-socket7?

I'm not sure on the CPU speed, CPU-z just reports Unknown processor, under mainboard it makes mention of MMX so i guess that makes it a GXm? The machine is from 1997 so if i had to guess i'd say either 180 or 200 mhz. No socket, it's BGA, i've not removed the heatsink as that requires removing the board & that looks one heck of a task.
I'm completely unable to install either win95 or win98, as soon as i have made a FAT32 partition, the machine refuses to boot either, off CD or floppy boot disk, starts to load command.com, then hangs, it's fine without a HD or if the hard disk is a NTFS partitioned one, very weird. I thought this might be the 20gig hard disk(works fine with 2k in here and 98 on other machines), so I went to the local computer shop today and bought the smallest IDE drive they had, a 10gig seagate, exactly the same behaviour so I'm somewhat at a complete loss now. As i say it will happily run win2k without issues except video and audio drivers that don't seem to exist.

The drivers disk should have NT4 drivers. Those may work with W2K. For Win9x, try using a FAT, not FAT32, partition.

If it is BGA, I suspect 180 MHz or less.

Thanks, I'll try a FAT partition and see how that goes, fingers crossed. Any idea where I may find a drivers disk?

Can't vouch for them, but:
http://home.icequake.net/~nemesis/pc/support/ … rixmediagx.html
Driverguide has some as well

Sleepless nights of online searching. This is how I found the Cx5530 drivers for my ECS P5GX-M motherboard. Russian and eastern European FTP sites seem to be great resources for old drivers.

Try following wikipedia's suggestion of installing Windows on another computer and then transfer the HD.

I once had a system just like this until I lost it in a move, the hard part will be getting the drivers but beyond that it is pretty slow and is really a Cyrix 586 class system. I don't know if the IGP and integrated sound is dos friendly but if all goes well you scored a sweet dos rig.

EDIT: the cpu speed in these system ranges from 150-180 mhz but still slower than the M1 per clock.

Matth79 wrote:

Can't vouch for them, but:
http://home.icequake.net/~nemesis/pc/support/ … rixmediagx.html
Driverguide has some as well

Thanks, yes these are the ones I tried, well at least the 2k one, audio worked, but video not, then registry died on reboot. Hopefully the 9x ones are fine when i manage to get it installed.

vetz wrote:

Try following wikipedia's suggestion of installing Windows on another computer and then transfer the HD.

I tried this. installed '98 on my PIII, then put the HD back in the cyrix, lock-up as soon as it attempted to boot. I'll try a standard FAT partition today rather than FAT32 and see how it goes.

If you are trying to install Win98 on another computer and move the HDD back to the Presario, you might want to install Win98 on a Cyrix 6x86- or Cyrix 5x86-based computer then transfer the HDD over.

feipoa wrote:

If you are trying to install Win98 on another computer and move the HDD back to the Presario, you might want to install Win98 on a Cyrix 6x86- or Cyrix 5x86-based computer then transfer the HDD over.

I would, but the next oldest PC I have available is a Pentium III 866mhz, I've not had time to try again with FAT16, got called into work on my holiday, might have a go after dinner.
Thanks 😀

Compaq doing what they did best nice compact systems but a pain if you try and do something they didn't plan for.
Mate had one of those all in 1 486's that looked a lot like a Mac classic. We never did upgrade it to Win98 either.

Still the challenge is part of the fun, good luck, could make a nice "portable" DOS PC if the soundcard will work

Neat machine, looks a lot newer than it really is. I read that it can even play CDs when the computer itself is off, unusual, but interesting feature. Guess the only thing its got going for it is that one ISA slot that could potentially get it connected to the net.

The bigfoots were crazy, I have 2 of them in my closet. Supposedly at the time they were made a physically larger disk was cheaper to make, or something like that. They are big and they are slow. Replacing it with any normal hard drive is a good upgrade, maybe even a DOM or a CF card could be a better alternative.

Maybe you could check out to see if there are any driver, chipset, bios, etc updates available. It might help with the compatibility. You can also look up to see if its possible to use a different cpu.

Worst comes to worst, you have a snazzy looking case.

No change using a FAT16 partition, tried running the drive in the slowest spec possible, no PIO, no LBA, but still hangs on startup with any 9x variant, but OK with 2k. I'm going to try and find an original Quantum Bigfoot HD as it clearly has some dislike for the 2 seagate and fireball i have tried so far under 9x. I'll tell you this is getting really frustrating!!!

To save time I'd boot from a DOS 7.10 floppy and run fdisk from there. Delete any existing partitions, create a small partition, set active, format /u /s, fdisk /MBR. Then if that works you can install Win9x on the existing partition, perhaps try expanding it later once 98 is booting.

Finally got this old girl going, found an old Fujitsu 540 meg hard disk at the bootsale for £1, installed that and in loaded up win 95 without a problem, finally got a working 95 box 😀 Was the hard drives over a certain size that was the problem as i had suspected.

Good going, just so you know, in the future, some hard drives have some jumpers on them that invoke a limit that lets them work on older hardware. I don't know if it depends on the model of the drive or not, so the jumper configuration may differ by brand.