Hello,

I first wanted to say how helpful this forum has been at providing resources and technical know how on the Compaq Elite 4/75cx. I am running into several roadblocks, and am wondering if the community can offer some help in overcoming these issues.

I locally acquired a Compaq Elite 4/75cx a few years back from a Craigslist ad. The machine appeared to be in mint condition, with the hard drive still working. I quickly discovered that the W1D belt has disintegrated, which required me to use DOS interlink with a null modem serial cable to transfer LapLink. Once I had LapLink set up, I was fine to transfer software over to the Elite. The issues began when trying to replace
The hard drive with a CF card. I have tried everything to get the CF card bootable, such as setting it up as a DOS bootable drive, as well as writing the GHO and IMG file provided by the archive.org source for the Elite 4/75 disk image. All I get is a message detecting the drive as a type 65 drive, and a blinking curser or “Missing operating system” message when attempting to boot. I also attempted to repair the floppy drives belt. I found the dimensions a few years back, and ordered the belt from Germany (forgot the name of the site). The belt ended up being too large to move the motor. Recently, I ordered a bag of 25 belts from Amazon spamming all the way to 125mm. I installed a new drive belt that appears to fit perfectly into the drive, and am able to spin the drive using the new belt. So here I am tonight attempting to boot a DOS floppy disk. The drive is giving off some strange noises, and I’m getting a Floppy Controller Error message during POST. I was very careful to make sure the heads were not affected, and put the drive back together exactly as I found it.

Do I have any current options that don’t require me to purchase a replacement W1D drive? I don’t want to be dependent on a soon to fail hard drive, and would like to utilize the CF card solution. I have tried three different CF cards with different capacities and brands (32mb RCA, 256mb off brand, and 4gb Sandisk), and I’m getting the same results with all three. Also, are there alternative solutions to the floppy drive, such as a custom Gotek solution? I know the pinout is proprietary, but I’m willing to try anything at this point. As an engineer, I really do not like running into walls at every turn. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.