That's nice of you.

Is it a good retro gaming laptop? Good screen? Any sound card?

Joakim wrote on 2022-05-15, 19:20:

Is it a good retro gaming laptop? Good screen? Any sound card?

It has a 10.4 inch 640x480 active matrix screen, so basically de creme de la creme for retro gaming. Sadly it doesn't have a sound card, so I use an external MIDI device or a Covox Speech Thing clone to get sound out of it. It is very picky with CF-cards, so I'd recommend anyone buying or having this laptop to use an SD-card or just the original hard drive. The build quality and serviceability is also excellent, and it doesn't have barrel battery of doom. It comes with a 486DX4-75 with 8MB of RAM, which I upgraded to 16MB. All around I really like this laptop. 😀

Sounds almost perfect. Maybe it can utilize of of those PCMCIA sound cards.

It could, but sadly I don't have one of those and the 9x-compatible ones are pretty rare. The PCMCIA sound cards you usually see for sale are for Windows 2000 or XP and up. I bet a sound card like that would make it the perfect portable retro gaming device.

Thanks for sharing. Trying to burn it into CD card. What software did you use to create it, and what can be user to burn it to a disk? Balena complains that the iso image is not bootable and when I burn it anyway, no partitions are seen on it.

* Sorry, I meant trying to burn it to CF card

If it's a hard disk image, it's not meant to be booted that way. (Cdrom)

I'd have to look more closely, but hard disk images are usually raw disk images, with a partition table and all that. Aside from 'hybrid iso' shenanigans used by linux live cds, these cannot be written to a cdrom as it is not an iso9660 filesystem.

Since this is for a pre-lba type hard disk, the raw image might not work if put onto a cf card with Etcher.

Let me examine this image file and get back to you.

Ok, file *is* an ISO image, and should be written to a CDR, not directly to a CF card.

I dont think it is bootable. It looks like this is a bland filesystem backup, not a proper disk image of a virgin/stock system.

To get this working for you:

Create a minimal boot floppy with fdisk, format, xcopy, mscdex, and cdrom drivers.

Partition, format (with /s flag!), the CF card in the system.

Change directory to the cdrom.

Use xcopy to copy the contents to the C: drive with the 'even empty subfolders' option.

Try booting from the CF, and pray.

Please note that the language regionalization of this dump is GERMAN.

It looks like dos 6.22

Hi all, It has been a long time since I made this backup, so I'm not entirely sure which software I used and how. Since it is an ISO file, I probably used PowerISO. If I remember correctly, the image wasn't bootable.

Thanks! I got myself a Compaq Contura 420C in a very spectacular condition, but with dead HDD. Trying to revive it. Got the recovery floppy images from internet archive, now waiting for a USB floppy drive to arrive, because I don't have anything to write those floppys with. The plan to create a bootable partition with recovery floppys and then copy files from this iso there seems reasonable.

Sounds like a solid plan. The Contura is a great laptop, so I expect you will get a lot of enjoyment out of it. 🙂

Ok, I finally succeeded. Found the working pair of setup/diag floppy creation tools, managed to install Win95 on the 1GB Compact Flash card. Boots like a charm. Then I copied a full disk image, supposedly, bootable: https://archive.org/details/compaq-contura-420c-win95-clean also attached there a setup/diag diskettes images.

Now I'll have to do something with the screen which has a huge light spot in the middle, looks like an early stage vinegar syndrome 😅