a friend dropped off his compaq presario desktop 5251 after wiping the
harddrive by vaccuming out the case (got the vaccum to close to the hard
drive). im attempting to reinstall his system for him but i dont have any
of the original software.
i have no problem installing xp pro on the machine. it boots to the cd
reliably and installs/runs but obviously the machine is a little bit slow
and would be better suited with 98/ME.
i have every generic MS boot disk (dos/95/95b/98/98se/me) but the machine
will not boot to them. every time i try to boot to the floppy boot disk i
get an I/O error, "remove disk and press any key to continue". i know the
boot disks are good because i can boot my generic computers with them. i
can only assume there is some sort of proprietary software required. the
bios has no boot order option so i can only assume that it is reading from
the floppy but cant say for sure.
what am i missing? is it possible to boot a presario with a generic MS boot
disk?
thanks,

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Nathan W. Collier
http://UtilityOffRoad.com
http://7SlotGrille.com