Compaq Quickrestore Issues

just wondering if someone can help me out a friend recently gave me a old Compaq Presario 7500 from the late 90s it had xp installed on it but i wanted to factory reinstall the original os and software(windows 98se) i have the recovery cd set for it but once i boot from the disc it tells me that the hard drive will be reformatted but then it reboots and does a constant loop of saying the hard drive will be reformatted and rebooting. anyone have any ideas ? thanks!

 

try manually formatting the drive first.

 

just tried that it didn't work.

 

are you able to browse the cd and skip the format and reboot process and just start the restore. It just sounds like it's auto running the cd each time it boots. Maybe change the boot order even.

 

the format is part of the recovery no way around it i took the hdd out to have a look and its not the original maybe that's the issue

 

maybe you can delete the partition on the drive so it will actually do the format.

 

done that to mate used hirens boot cd still no luck

 

only other thing I can think of is that they are not the correct CD's or even that the jumpers on the drive may have been changed. Surely that recovery would have just used a standard installer so you can run it from files on the disc.

 

cds are right it has the models supported on the label 7500 7588 7594 etc jumpers are on primary. all i can guess is it might not work since not the original hdd

 

the drive may need to be set to CS as most OEM's shipped drives in CS not master/slave configs.

 

It might just be crashing when loading the format/partition code. Try the classic swap RAM sticks around, put another drive in there and see if it fails on that, etc.

At the very least, unplug the drive and see if it correctly determines that there is no hard-drive connected.

I would also delete the MBR off the hard drive - might not be enough just to delete the partition. Use any Linux boot disc, open a terminal and type in:

Code:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

...then reboot and try again.

Also check that this is not one of those Compaq's that had the protection option in BIOS to prevent software writing to the MBR.

 

i dont have a linux disc but ive got hirens boot cd with gparted partition editor its linux based would the code work on there ?

 

Yes, that's Linux as well and will work.

Just open a terminal (on some desktops you can do that with CTRL+ALT+T or switch over to another console with CTRL+ALT+2, or find it in a menu somewhere) and type the above command.

If you get an error that the device doesn't exist, you might have to use "of=/dev/hda" instead. You can find out the exact device name with "sudo fdisk -l" which will list all fixed disks on the system.

 

Probably not the case but it's not one of the older hard drives where you had to select or enter the number of heads / sectors etc into the bios so that it could do a low level format correctly is it?

If it has those numbers printed on a sticker on the drive just make sure they match what is entered / auto detected in the bios.