Compaq Armada M700 not recognising my new 40 GB toshiba Harddisk

[Antoniov.]

Alex,
here there is the MS article about multiple boot
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;217210
may be this reading can help you, I hope.

Good Luck.
Antonio Vigliotti

[Omar Senussi]

Antonio,
I don't think he's got ANY OS on his HD!

[Alex_367]

First i wanna thank you guys for trying to help me solve this problem...
1)tlaking about the bios,i think my bios is pretty old,last updated 1999,but it has recognaized my new harddrive,there is no option in my bios to make the cd rom drive the first boot device
boot order in bios is like this:
Notebook Multibay;first
Notebook harddrive:second
Notebook Ethernat :third
and CD-Rom boot and Floppy Boot both set to enable.......thats about my bios.
PS i never updated a bios before..thats why iam little scary to do this
2)i can not neither boot from win98 bootdisk or Mellenium bootdisk,nor from Xp cd
but what i can do is booting from a win xp start up disk.what i have done is booted from this disk and than removed it and inserted win me bootdisk cuz it contains the Fdisk File,and i was able yesterday to partition my new harddrive with no OS on it......sofar so good
3)wanted to format the drive with the same disk,typed in the promt format c:/s,didnt work cuz the disk doesnt contain the format file.
so what iam gonna try doing next is getting this Format file,and try to format the drive with it hopefully it will work.......
i will come back to say if it works...thanks anyways guys

[Omar Senussi]

Alex,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your multibay houses BOTH floppy AND CD drive right? So when you have the CD in the multibay, you've effectively got that as your FIRST BOOT device.
If you start the computer with the CD drive in the bay and the XP CD in the drive.. do you not get the prompt to press any key to boot from CD??

[Alex_367]

Hi OMAR,

no i dont get any prompt,thats the problem,its not booting although iam sure that the cd bootable.......and CD-rom works........cuz i can use my old harddisk,and it boots when i insert the xp cd.only with my new hard drive its not booting....

[Alex_367]

hi guys,
the bootdisk 98se that i downloadd from www.bootdisk.com
is an exe file,how can i make it bootable,
i mean when i dowload it from the site should i make anything to make it bootable,or it should bootable from alone???????

[Omar Senussi]

The file should be executed (from a hd) with a floppy disk in the drive to create your boot disk. In fact all the files on that site need to be expanded.. including the one for a bios update. One problem may be your current bios doesn't support 40Gb drive?

[Roger Faucher]

Alex:

I think Omar has hit the nail on the head. Update your BIOS and keep your fingers crossed. Make certain not to do this on battery power alone.

Make a great day!

Roger

[Antoniov.]

Alex,
I'm not sure you can't boot from CD. I know some laptop bios are not easy to update boot device order. I guess, after you displayed boot device page you can select 1.st device then you can drop down within down arrow or else you can select typing page down or plus/minus keystroke.
My first question is: if you can boot from FD with windows xp startup, you were be able to format HD; if I remember, installation software ask for this option.
Again, if you have very old bios, you have to set HD access mode as LBA.
My second question is: this HD is new one; can you boot from old HD? If you can't boot from old HD means some value of bios is wrong!

Antonio Vigliotti

[Ronald Postma]

Hi Alex,
can you put both CD-rom and floppydrive in your laptop at the same time?

Regards,
Ronald