Are you positive your hard drive size settings are correct? It won't run unless it's exactly correct, and i'm guessing that got changed from what it was.

pii_legacy wrote on 2020-06-15, 04:45:

Are you positive your hard drive size settings are correct? It won't run unless it's exactly correct, and i'm guessing that got changed from what it was.

To be totally honest, I’m unsure. I seem to only have the option to select one of these existing drives from the BIOS or define new drive, there doesn’t seem to be much option in the setup

It might not be too wild a thought that the disk has died on you after some intenstive writing. Happened to me a couple of days ago!

Anyway, run this from a floppy to get the drive geometry for BIOS: https://archive.org/details/whatide

And here are the factory image files if you want them: https://archive.org/details/compaq425433filesmsdos62

Pierre32 wrote on 2020-06-15, 05:03:

It might not be too wild a thought that the disk has died on you after some intenstive writing. Happened to me a couple of days ago!

Anyway, run this from a floppy to get the drive geometry for BIOS: https://archive.org/details/whatide

And here are the factory image files if you want them: https://archive.org/details/compaq425433filesmsdos62

I’ll give this a try as soon as, thank you!

Unfortunately no luck. Installed an IBM 170mb, managed to get to the old install of windows on it, as well as boot into DOS. Formatted the HD from there, installed a new copy of Windows, got all the way to reboot after install and now we are back to not being able to boot anything from disk or floppy. All physical connections are fine and it is capable of booting both from HD and Floppy, it just won’t and I can’t figure why ..

So these are my options presented to me at bios, disk seems correctly identified and floppy boot enabled.

And then this is the error message displayed

And if I boot without a floppy in the drive

And then of course if I boot with a boot disk in the drive I’m hanging on this forever

if there isnt an auto setting that is correct for the drive, then look at the physical drive itself. they usually have the CHS info on them, and you may need to manually enter that in the bios.

Cobra42898 wrote on 2020-06-15, 17:34:

if there isnt an auto setting that is correct for the drive, then look at the physical drive itself. they usually have the CHS info on them, and you may need to manually enter that in the bios.

Thanks, although I have already tried defining custom drive type with both drives tried so far, cylinders, heads, sectors exactly as on the drive.

I don’t suppose precomp or max ecc need to be specified?

I may give out a postcode for finding a Compaq Presario 425 in a random skip. Got windows installed again, installed some drivers, tried installing Iomega zip drivers, had to reboot, forgot all drivers the first time, second time forgot how to boot to windows or dos

Have a look at this thread: Compaq Presario 433, my 486 pure DOS machine

OP says he had difficulty getting a different HDD installed, possibly due to some weird proprietary config the Compaq does. But others say they've done it. It might be a lead for further investigation. I'm a 425 owner but I'm still running the stock HDD, so I haven't had to think about this issue yet.

FYI your pics are pretty tiny, so I can't really see what's going on!

Pierre32 wrote on 2020-06-15, 21:00:

Have a look at this thread: Compaq Presario 433, my 486 pure DOS machine

OP says he had difficulty getting a different HDD installed, possibly due to some weird proprietary config the Compaq does. But others say they've done it. It might be a lead for further investigation. I'm a 425 owner but I'm still running the stock HDD, so I haven't had to think about this issue yet.

FYI your pics are pretty tiny, so I can't really see what's going on!

Thanks for that, I had a quick read through the thread and it’s helpful, hopefully. I’ve got a bit of trouble getting a BIOS flash onto readable media at the moment, a million floppy drives and none writing.

However I have noticed that after any real length of time the BIOS totally forgets time, date and I’m assuming the defined drives, boot order etc too. Despite it managing to boot into Windows after 20 years of inactivity when I took ownership.

So I’ve ordered a new soldering iron and the CMOS battery is getting replaced, I’m not sure it’s going to help seeing as even when I do get into booting MS-DOS it just hangs with no input available.

I’ll update this thread if I do find a solution just in case anyone else finds the same issue but I have to be honest with my limited ability and the seemingly random behaviour of the machine I don’t think I’ll be booting into an OS twice in a row.

how is that ZIP disk connected?

evasive wrote on 2020-06-15, 22:29:

how is that ZIP disk connected?

Parallel port just as it came

RussellM wrote on 2020-06-15, 22:23:

Thanks for that, I had a quick read through the thread and it’s helpful, hopefully. I’ve got a bit of trouble getting a BIOS fla […]
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Pierre32 wrote on 2020-06-15, 21:00:

Have a look at this thread: Compaq Presario 433, my 486 pure DOS machine

OP says he had difficulty getting a different HDD installed, possibly due to some weird proprietary config the Compaq does. But others say they've done it. It might be a lead for further investigation. I'm a 425 owner but I'm still running the stock HDD, so I haven't had to think about this issue yet.

FYI your pics are pretty tiny, so I can't really see what's going on!

Thanks for that, I had a quick read through the thread and it’s helpful, hopefully. I’ve got a bit of trouble getting a BIOS flash onto readable media at the moment, a million floppy drives and none writing.

However I have noticed that after any real length of time the BIOS totally forgets time, date and I’m assuming the defined drives, boot order etc too. Despite it managing to boot into Windows after 20 years of inactivity when I took ownership.

So I’ve ordered a new soldering iron and the CMOS battery is getting replaced, I’m not sure it’s going to help seeing as even when I do get into booting MS-DOS it just hangs with no input available.

I’ll update this thread if I do find a solution just in case anyone else finds the same issue but I have to be honest with my limited ability and the seemingly random behaviour of the machine I don’t think I’ll be booting into an OS twice in a row.

Cool. Good opportunity to replace the soldered battery with an offboard type. Look forward to hearing how you go.

Out of interest, for the sake of a novice, how would I go about writing those factory image files to the HDD considering the size ?

That's a challenge. Any way to get the Zip drive working without having to install drivers to C:? You would of course need a way to write to it from another computer too.

Personally I use a parallel port CF reader, but that's an obscure solution. For any other machine I'd say grab a cheap internal IDE-CF adapter, but that's not straightforward in these machines (as there are no spare IDE or molex connectors). I have one of these in mine too, but it required some cabling modifications.

Other options include parallel port CD-ROM, ISA ethernet card, or connecting the HDD to a modern PC with USB-IDE adapter.

Pierre32 wrote on 2020-06-15, 23:17:

That's a challenge. Any way to get the Zip drive working without having to install drivers to C:? You would of course need a way to write to it from another computer too.

Personally I use a parallel port CF reader, but that's an obscure solution. For any other machine I'd say grab a cheap internal IDE-CF adapter, but that's not straightforward in these machines (as there are no spare IDE or molex connectors). I have one of these in mine too, but it required some cabling modifications.

Other options include parallel port CD-ROM, ISA ethernet card, or connecting the HDD to a modern PC with USB-IDE adapter.

I have a huge stack of old network cards so most likely option would be the ISA Ethernet card, I guess my only concern then is will it be possible without any command prompt available from the recepient machine, I guess so, doubt Compaq were paying the hours for booting each system!

Edit: no the Zip drive isn’t going to work, unfortunately the stage I’m at I can’t even select a drive let alone run drivers but I did notice it wasn’t working prior without driver install

(I should learn to think before typing): I have lots of empty IDE external drive cases, that ought to be worth a shot.

SOLUTION

This is for the benefit of anyone else that may come across this thread whilst searching for the same issue.

This does not resolve the BIOS issue which will require the CMOS battery to be replaced.

Stuck at “Starting MS-DOS...”

-reboot into F10 system setup

-set custom drive definition to exactly as written on physical hard dyrive or in specifications for your drive

-Make find, borrow or steal DOS 5.O disk and insert into A:

-Run DOS install and open into shell

-Search C: for any windows folders, delete from C: with deltree windows or deltree [folder name]

-Reboot and make sure you can get back into shell, then insert Win 3.1 Disk & run setup

I had previously tried formatting the disk and removing windows and it just didn’t work, the ONLY way I could get myself back into Windows was by doing this exact sequence and using MS-DOS 5. 0

Thank you kindly for replies and help, it’s very much appreciated.

Good work sorting it out. So if I'm reading it correctly, the key to this was using a fresh DOS 5.0 boot disk instead of the original system boot disk? And said original disk is the Compaq OEM disk?

The system did originally have the Compaq OEM installed, however after forgetting itself (my presumed CMOS issue) it wouldn’t boot back into the windows installation, even if you specify very clearly the drive parameters and also the directory location in DOS and that was only after re-installing DOS on a newly defined drive (of course as stated physically on the drive).

For some reason or other my issue seemed to be with DOS 6.22. It may have just been that there were multiple windows directories on the drive by the time I had finished (3.11/3.1).

So yes a completely fresh install of 5.0 and retail 3.1 on top of that, checking and double checking the drive was defined correctly and all windows directories were removed and it worked first time and consistently. As I mentioned it definitely has an issue with the CMOS battery, which I imagine is a simple replace (not so simple as I’m sure you know on this board) since it forgets the system settings entirely when power is unplugged.

This Compaq seems to have 2 ISA slots, which it seems are usually equipped with a network card and a soundcard..
http://eintr.net/systems/compaq/presario433/index.html

Wouldn't it the best to just use XTIDE Universal BIOS then ?
This would avoid the need to ever enter Compaq BIOS again and would allow for pretty big fixed disk drives also. 😀