Compaq Armada M700 not recognising my new 40 GB toshiba Harddisk

[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

[Omar Senussi]

I think the answer to that, Ronald, is ONLY if he uses a usb floppy or CD drive. With that bios, I think he'd be lucky to get a boot from a usb floppy drive.

ANother thing has just hit me in the face! http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?locale=en_US&taskId=110&prodSeriesId=96235&prodTypeId=321957&objectID=PSD_PH010208_CW02

A known problem with (some) HD .. smaller than this one

"Unit hangs and cannot detect Hitachi hard drives"
customer advisory PH010208_CW02 revision 0
released September 2001

description

Notebooks using Hitachi 5, 6, and 12GB hard drives (HDD`s) may exhibit slow performance and/or hang followed by the Armada notebook not recognizing the hard drive. After rebooting the system, the following message may appear:
"Fixed Disk Parameter Table or BIOS Error, System Halted".

So A bios update seems to be highly advisable!

[Alex_367]

Hi ALL,
i have good news to say guys,i was able to partition my hardrive and format it with win98 bootdisk..............the problem before was the bootdisk.......bios had recognised it.as a 40 GB...now i still have to install the driver for the cd-rom drive inorder to install win xp on it.......anyways i would like to thank you guys for the help.............i will come again ...to tell if it works

[Alex_367]

Hi again,
iwasnt really succecfull with installing my cdrom drive manually.......
first thing i have to say.........i can not put my cd_dvd rom drive and floppy drive at the same time...
i booted my pc using win98 bootdisk......usually the bootdisk must download the driver for the cd-dvd rom drive...but hence the cd rom drive ist not inserted in the notebbok at the boot time the driver is not succefully installed.......thats why i need now to install it manually
my DVD-ROM DRIVE
is COMPAQ MODEL: DRN-8040B
i downloaded already a driver for it but it didnt contain an install.exe or setup.exe
it contained setup.diy and it is not executable in dos...........so maybe someone can help me in finding the proper driver so that i install win xp on it.......thanx

[Omar Senussi]

.diy? DoItYourself! Can you open it with notepad? probably contains some instructions.. where did you get it from?.. can you give th link?

[Omar Senussi]

I think this is the place you need to look!

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Armada/us/download/8053.html

[Alex_367]

hi guys,
I got my problem solved....
my laptop has one slot for both floppy and cd rom........so when i was booting from floppy.the driver for the cd-rom wasnt getting installed,cuz the device was not detected.
what i have done is downloaded a cdindos2 file
from bootdisk.com,this file make you see your cd rom after formatting the drive and booting from c,it will also copy over the config.sys and autoexec.bat files requeird to get Cd rom drive working.........i would like to than k you all guys for trying to help me.....maybe someone will benefit from my problem.till the next problem..:)

[Alex_367]

proplem got solved.THANKS