I have an old Compaq Presario 7800 (P-III, 256 Mb RAM) which I am trying to renovate by installing a new HDD and Win-XP (It used to run Win98 but the HDD went bad, I still have the Win-98 upgrade CD but I no longer have the original Win-95 discs so the Win-98 upgrade does not find the "qualifying components" which allow an upgrade to proceed).
I've installed the new HDD (80Gb partitioned C:=20G, D:= the rest) and that works fine. I have Win-XP Pro on CD but the BIOS does not offer option to boot from CD so that I can install. BIOS offers only floppy and HDD as boot options. If I disconnect the HDD the BIOS then offers floppy and CD-ROM as boot options. I can find no way to include boot from CD when the HDD is connected.
If I boot to DOS from a floppy which includes a CD-ROM driver, I can access the CD-ROM via DOS but the Win-XP SETUP does not run under DOS so I still can't install.
Can anyone please tell me how I can persuade the BIOS to allow a boot from CD when the HDD and floppy are connected ? Thank you.
Try disconnecting the floppy and see if it gives you HDD and CD-ROM as boot options then... just a thought.Thanks Deerpark, I thought of that myself last night, tried it but then it offers only HDD for boot.
Then I put the HDD in another computer (another old Compaq, I seem to have so many of them !), formatted it and installed the XP Pro. Perfect result. Put the HDD back into the Compaq I'm trying to renovate and tried to boot. No go ! This TIME I get the error message "NTLDR Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)PARTITION(1)" then nothing.

Any other ideas ?

Thanks. rb

You can install from DOS. Boot from a floppy with CD support. You need to load Smartdrv so put smartdrv.exe on the floppy, run it and then run \I386\WINNT.EXE on your xp cd-rom.

You COULD try without smartdrv but xp install may complain.


Thanks for that advice contrex, it led to me solving the problem although not the way you expected.
I have such a floppy with CD-ROM drivers and smartdrv so I tried to boot that way. Could yesterday, couldn't today ! So in trying to get the floppy to boot, I tried disabling the HDD and then the CD drives (there are two). I noticed that when disabling the Primary CONTROLLER I lost the CD drives and when disabling the secondary I lost the HDD. Delving into the guts of the machine I swapped the primary and secondary cables. And there you go: "Press any key to boot from CD" !!!!!
That was not my doing, I can only think that the Compaq tech put the primary and secondary the wrong way round when replacing the motherboard under warranty many years ago. Don't know why it never gave me any problem before.

Anyway, XP-Pro installed and running. Thanks for your help guys. Great job.

Only one small problem remaining, when I boot, I get offered a choice of two OSs, both XP Pro. The first one is the good one I've just installed, the second one is the inoperable one created during one of my installation attempts yesterday. How do I get rid of the one I don't want ?

Quote from: ringbinder on July 26, 2007, 07:06:52 AM

Only one small problem remaining, when I boot, I get offered a choice of two OSs, both XP Pro. The first one is the good one I've just installed, the second one is the inoperable one created during one of my installation attempts yesterday. How do I get rid of the one I don't want ?