All,

I noticed the love for the Compaq Armada series, expressed by some here, and picked one up cheaply. It came with a 12GB IDE disk that had a number of bad sectors, so I pulled it, and replaced it with an SSD, as I often do with old PC laptops. However, unlike many others, this machine seems to be _very_ picky about its disks.

I've tried:

• msata-to-ide adapter w/128gb sata ssd
• cf-to-ide adapter w/16gb CF card
• sd-to-ide adapter w/32gb SD card

All seem to have issues, at some point. The CF solution seems the most promising, but the QuickRestore CD seems to make a hash of it, when trying to format and restore. I can, however, manually format, install DOS, and boot from it, just fine.

Any ideas? I've tried hacking Compaq's QuickRestore software a bit, but I haven't hit the right combo to make it use the disk without partitoning/formatting.

Thanks!
- Alex