[try to be a geek]

found it at a flee market and it started up nicely but once i put another hard drive in it wont boot up. i have tried 4 different haarddrives,two freshly formated 80gs and two 7gs with windows 98se oh and how do you get the pictures on the side

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Edited by try to be a geek, 10 July 2005 - 06:02 PM.

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What model Compaq?

[makai]

What model Compaq?

[Irongeek]

found it at a flee market and it started up nicely but once i put another hard drive in it wont boot up. i have tried 4 different haarddrives,

What are the jumpers set to on the back of the hard drive if this is misconfigured I think we just found the promblem. Try setting the jumpers on the master drive to "master with slave present". Some drives may have one setting for both single and master and, therefore, will not need any jumper changes.

[Tyger]

Lots of things. Yes, please let us know what model and what version of BIOS it has. While it's booting have you tried to enter setup?

It won't be able to recognize an 80gb drive, and even trying to do it may couse some temporary problems. The BIOS may be set to recognize a particular sized drive, so subbing another one may cause problems. You definitely need to get into Setup, by holding down whatever key is required during the POST screen. Check all the BIOS settings, if for no reason than to know how it is set up. You may need to set the BIOS to the default setting, in case the 80gb drives changed something, reboot with the 7gb drive, if that doesn't work you may need to manually detect the hard drive. And one more thing, make sure it has memory. If the guy at the flea market wouldn't let you have the working hard drive he may have taken out the memory too.