You should be able to boot the recovery cd, if the PC is 4 years old or less
(early models couldn't boot CDs). Be sure there is no floppy disk in the
drive. Put the recovery CD (Quick Restore) in the CD drive. Turn the PC
off. Turn the PC on. See if it boots the CD and gives you a menu to
restore.
If that doesn't work, look around for a companion floppy that came with the
Quick Restore CD. It might be necessary to put both in (not sure on a
5000). Turn on PC. See if it boots floppy, then activates CD, then gives
you a menu.
If that doesn't work, you may need to come up with a boot floppy that can
activate a CD drive. They are available on the net if you look around a bit
(
http://support.buympc.com/file_lib/boot.html for one). Make a CD
activating boot floppy and boot it. When you get to the a:\ prompt, type
the CD drive letter followed by a colon (might be R:, might be D:, could be
anything). You should get to a R:\ prompt. Now try different possible
commands (SETUP, START, INSTALL, QR, etc.) to see if you get a menu to use
for restore.
If that doesn't work, report back with your results and somebody can
probably take you to the next step.
"Paula M" wrote in message
.. .
Hey all.
I really need help, computer is compaq 5000 (desktop) don't have all the
details to it, as it's my sister's. But I can get them if needed! What
i
do know is
That we had to reformat her hard drive thru msdos - because the recovery
disk wouldn't work, nothing worked - couldn't get into anything to do with
the computer (my computer/controlpanel, nothing at all) kept comin up with
some error) She has a 30gb hard drive, which was partioned...was
windows
ME operation system.
So anyhow - we reformated, fdisked, repartioned it, try to boot up by
floppy
and everything else (even recovery cd) - nothing has worked!!! In a last
hope, we tried to install 98 by boot disk, to see if that would work -
Stil
NOTHING!
Just comes up with a A: promt thingy....but we can't do much from there.
We tried setup.exe, and all those things -but nothing.. We have looked at
various way to install it..tried many ways - nothing!
Can anyone give me an detailed way to do this? We are totally at lost, on
how to get this computer back up and running. I'm really hopein someone
knows what they are doing, cuz we don't anymore - we are at lost!
Thanks!! 
Paula