casperthedog
Instructor
I have a Compaq 5200 MMX (P2 200mhz 160MB ram). The old 2.1GB HDD died and I bought a new HDD. It is a 30GB 7200rpm OEM drive.
I ran into problems installing it as older Compaq machines have the bios stored in a non-DOS partition (F10) at the beginning of the drive, but eventually got the BIOS and Win98 installed. The BIOS takes about 7MB, then the Win98 partition takes 5GB and the rest I have left to dual boot Win2000. (Sounds ambitious but I had win2000 working perfectly till the old drive died)
It is an old machine so I wondered if I would need a drive overlay program to allow it to see the full 30GB, but the bios seems happy enough and reports the full 30GB no problem.
However - I keep getting the same problem. I'll install everything at night after work and it will work ok for the rest of the evening. Next morning however, after the white Compaq POST screen I just get a flashing cursor in the top left - and the HDD is very quiet with no light flashing. After about 20seconds it will report an error, but not always the same one. Sometimes it will say No OS, other times 'Disk Error' etc. I feel sure it has something to do with the drive being inactive.
The clock still reads correctly in the bios and I have the latest version available for the machine.
At times during the win98 installation, the HDD seems to stop for long periods (a few minutes) also. I know it's an old machine but win98 is pretty old too and the machine has plenty of ram.
Will an overlay help? Is the drive too fast? Why does it work when first installed but not if left for a while?
I hope someone can help. Getting an answer out of the compaq forums is like banging you head against a wall.
I ran into problems installing it as older Compaq machines have the bios stored in a non-DOS partition (F10) at the beginning of the drive, but eventually got the BIOS and Win98 installed. The BIOS takes about 7MB, then the Win98 partition takes 5GB and the rest I have left to dual boot Win2000. (Sounds ambitious but I had win2000 working perfectly till the old drive died)
It is an old machine so I wondered if I would need a drive overlay program to allow it to see the full 30GB, but the bios seems happy enough and reports the full 30GB no problem.
However - I keep getting the same problem. I'll install everything at night after work and it will work ok for the rest of the evening. Next morning however, after the white Compaq POST screen I just get a flashing cursor in the top left - and the HDD is very quiet with no light flashing. After about 20seconds it will report an error, but not always the same one. Sometimes it will say No OS, other times 'Disk Error' etc. I feel sure it has something to do with the drive being inactive.
The clock still reads correctly in the bios and I have the latest version available for the machine.
At times during the win98 installation, the HDD seems to stop for long periods (a few minutes) also. I know it's an old machine but win98 is pretty old too and the machine has plenty of ram.
Will an overlay help? Is the drive too fast? Why does it work when first installed but not if left for a while?
I hope someone can help. Getting an answer out of the compaq forums is like banging you head against a wall.
