View Single Post
  #2  
Old February 18th 04, 05:10 PM
DEJ57
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

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.



Its hard to believe the vacuum wiped the drive. Are you sure? How do you know
if you can't boot? My gut guess would be that you knocked loose a data cable
with the vac...

Dale