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Help to resurrect Compaq Contura 386 Laptop

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First post, by Wdj2005

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Hi folks,

I've been spending the last few weeks trying a lot of different ways to solve this problem, inspired by this forum and many other similar vintage PC blogs and sites.

Basically, I can't boot my newly acquired Compaq Contura 3/20 386SX Laptop.
Hardware status:
RAM seems good.
CPU seems good
Power Supply may have issues, main battery is dead. CMOS battery seems ok, but I could replace it - button cell.
Conner 84Mbyte HDD spins up and reads with some bad sectors in my main PC, after doing the blue tape repair. Does not boot or work reliably in the laptop.
Floppy drive doesn't seem to read.

I imaged the HDD and loaded it on Virtual Box - it still wouldn't boot - so I found images of Compaq OEM DOS 5.0 install disks and used them with VirtualBox to make the hard disk image bootable again, and win 3.1 loaded up ok. I imaged this working VM, and DD'ed it back onto the Conner drive in my main PC. I can boot from USB floppy and start windows from the Conner drive on my main PC, but can't boot from the Conner drive directly.

Main PC is a Gigabyte motherboard with Intel Core I5 CPU, SATA discs, and a VIA PCI SATA/PATA IDE controller. I use a TEAC floppy drive on a USB interface.
The Conner drive has various 'symptoms' - it will only spin up repeatedly in my main PC, and seems happier in a warm room and horizontal.
When it's on the laptop, it seems to spin up, but makes horrible scratching noises - I presume it's not quite spinning up fully... as it then stops, and the restarts, again and again.

What I'd like to do is create a suitable disc image on my main PC, transfer it to a CF card, and use an adaptor to put that CF card in to the laptop, but even though it's a 256MByte flash card, I've not idea what cylinder/header/sectors to pick.
I've tried various driver overlay tools on different HDDs, like a 4GByte Toshiba drive, but they either don't seem to boot, or expect physical floppy drives to install DOS/Windows after they have done their magic on the HDD.

Also at my disposal is a Toshiba 460CDT pentium laptop with CD-ROM and removal 2.5" disk. I've got a 3.5" floppy on order for it.

Can any one offer any advice please? I suspect there's an issue with the HDD MBR, and perhaps also the hardware.
Or what would be an ideal, can anyone offer to provide an image, or put an image on my CF disk that might be robust and flexible enough to enable the laptop to boot up?

Any ideas gratefully received.

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Reply 1 of 4, by Jo22

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I've replaced the HDD in my Compaq Armada by a 4GB CF card, if memory serves.
But I was unable to use it natively, I had to use the drive geometry of the old IDE HDD.
In other words, I made an 1:1 copy

In my smaller Compaq, I couldn't get a CF going, at all.
I got FDISK to do its job, but the settings didn't stick.
Formatting/booting didn't work. So I put back the HDD.

I didn't use an overlay software (DDO), however.
Maybe it had worked with a DDO.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 2 of 4, by DAVE86

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Wdj2005 wrote on 2022-12-18, 22:22:
Hi folks, […]
Show full quote

Hi folks,

I've been spending the last few weeks trying a lot of different ways to solve this problem, inspired by this forum and many other similar vintage PC blogs and sites.

Basically, I can't boot my newly acquired Compaq Contura 3/20 386SX Laptop.
Hardware status:
RAM seems good.
CPU seems good
Power Supply may have issues, main battery is dead. CMOS battery seems ok, but I could replace it - button cell.
Conner 84Mbyte HDD spins up and reads with some bad sectors in my main PC, after doing the blue tape repair. Does not boot or work reliably in the laptop.
Floppy drive doesn't seem to read.

This may partially relate to your issues, but I've had similar problems. I have three contura laptops. One 386 and two 486. In the ones that had aluminium electroliytic capacitors on the mainbord the machine started doing all kinds of wierd stuff. Every time the original hdd got some command it just spun down and back. Tried to replace the original drives but bios seems picky about disk geometry and AT compatibility.

So, after a while the capacitors started to leak badly and the notebook was no longer even posting.
The one mainboard that had tantalum capacitors never had any issue. FDD was dead in all three too. And also in the dispaly panel seemingly died or had a glitchy image. Same problem, bad capacitors.
And lastly, the original power bricks. When the capacitors started to rot in the power supply it was shutting down intermittently. This was way back in 2010.

Reply 3 of 4, by Wdj2005

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Thanks for the suggestions... I'll certainly look at replacing the capacitors in due course.

I've managed to get the laptop to boot today, this is what worked:
Lexar 256MB CF Card in an IDE adaptor in my Toshiba 460XCDT laptop.
Booted with a DOS floppy containing Anydrive DDO tool - installed Anydrive, and then rebooted and installed COMPAQ DOS 5.0 from the disk images I found online.
Anydrive settings were: H=13 C=720 S=51 which corresponded to one of the Disk options in the BIOS.
Now able to use CF card in a USB CF card reader to add more software like Windows 3.1, Doom, Wolfenstein, Word, Excel etc. All working ok.

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