Re: Compaq ProLinea 4/100 Probs
After replacing the original hard drive with a new one, I ran into the classic headache: no F10 setup, and the system refused to format 1.44 MB floppies correctly – it kept detecting them as 720K and throwing “Invalid media or Track 0 bad” errors. I tried several other SoftPaq versions without success and was about to give up.

Then I found the mention of SP4711.EXE in this very thread. Downloaded it, ran it on another PC (it’s a self‑extracting executable), and it created the two required diskettes (DIAGNOSTICS and SETUP) without any fuss. Put the first disk into the Prolinea, booted from it, and the installation of the Diagnostics Partition went through flawlessly on the first try. After reboot, pressing F10 at the big cursor brought up the Compaq Utilities just as it should.

A few tips :

· Get the right SoftPaq version. For the Prolinea 4/50, SP4711 seems to be the one that works – other versions I tested did not.
· Don’t bother formatting floppies on the Prolinea itself if you get the 720K detection issue.
· Create the diskettes on any other working computer– the Prolinea only needs to read them, and it does that perfectly fine.

I’m really grateful for this community and the preserved knowledge here. Without this thread, my old Compaq would have stayed a doorstop. Thank you all!