First post, by ultranothing
Hi! TL;DR I used to be pretty skilled on these old machines back when they were state-of-the-art. I'm a bit rusty now and could use a little professional help; but in the meantime, let's focus on some computer problems 😀
I have a pretty sweet little Compaq LTE 5400 with a P1-150 and 81mb of ram. Overkill, I know! I took out the 1.2gb HDD and picked up a 16gb CF and an adapter for the IDE bay. I have ONE floppy disk that is about fifteen years old which I was lucky to find laying around the house (from the Wal-Mart photo center back in the day) and I created a DOS 6.22 bootdisk with it.
So that's pretty much where I'm stuck. I boot from floppy and I get to "Booting from floppy disk" and then "starting MS-DOS" and then...nothing. It just hangs there for probably ever but I've only ever given it about twenty minutes which I assume is enough time to know it ain't gonna work. The floppy drive access light remains illuminated also, I should probably add - though there's no sound of it trying to do anything.
This old girl has SystemSoft BIOS for (and I'm just doing this from memory because I'm in a different room) VIPER 557/558 version 07.32 and a brief excursion in the BIOS menu did confirm that it recognizes the CF drive - well, 8gb of it.
I have access to the CF drive on another PC with a card reader so I've been trying all sorts of methods to format it. Most recently I've formatted it in FAT with a 1gb partition which is how it sits in the computer now.
Is there a way to prepare the CF card that I'm missing? Or does the problem appear to start and end at the floppy? I'm thinking it's the latter - maybe the old floppy disk is just screwed up somehow?
I'd really love some input from the community on how one might suggest going about getting DOS (and then Windows 98) running on this thing. Is there a way to bypass the floppy and make the CF bootable? I've tried unpacking a Win98 install CD onto it in the hopes that it would kick on and let me re-partition, etc.
Any help would be awesome!