Compaq Armada 1700... how do I get into the BIOS???!

[ripthesystem]

My friend at work just picked up an older laptop and we can't figure out how to get into the BIOS- any clues?

It's a Compaq Armada 1700 ..

thanks!
ripthesystem

 

[rudder]

I think with compaqs you hit either the f2 or f10 key at startup.

 

[ripthesystem]

tried F2, F10, Del... none work

any others?

 

[Pederv]

If I remember correctly, when the cursor moves from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen is when you press F10.

 

[bacillus]

the timing of when you press F10 is crucial!

 

[ripthesystem]

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!

almost a month has passed now and my friend has just about given up on his laptop. He gave it to me to take home and see what I could do...

I still can't get into the BIOS!!!!

The problem is we can't get it to boot off of a floppy at all.. I thought maybe the BIOS needed tweaked but I can't get to it!
When the computer boots I get the Compaq logo and it starts counting the memory on the top left of the screen. After that I get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left for about 3 seconds and then it starts loading windows..

The cursor never moves to the right of the screen. I have tried just about every combination of pressing F10 I can think of- can anyone shed some more light???!!!

thx
ripthesystem

 

[bacillus]

should be F10.
suggest you hit esc as soon as you first see the compaq logo & see what key you need to press!
like others said before, timing is crucial.

 

[DaFinn]

We have one of those at work, you get to BIOS by pressing F10 when the cursor starts to blink in upper left corner.
You only have 2-3 seconds to do it. So as stated before its all about timing.

I know that some big companies change the "normal" bios options, by specially programming it, so that workers dont mess up their machines. I hope you dont have a machine that has previously been in some of these big companies. Then your out of luck...

 

[ripthesystem]

thanks for your help all.
still no luck tho. I seriously have tried it all. Finally broke down and talked to Comcrap yesterday and they said that on that model the BIOS actually resides on a partition on the HD. And that dometimes if you install an OS (like these people did) you can remove that partition and essentially have a laptop with no BIOS...

WTF???

Anyways he says I should download the BIOS upgrade flash from the site.. I do that and run as instructed but alas--- it says it can't upgrade the BIOS because the BIOS is not there. UGH!

ideas now?
thx
ripthesystem

 

[reicherb]

No BIOS = No Boot

 

[Pederv]

Try the Personal Computer Diagnostics. You'll need to put it on an unpartitioned drive. Since you can't get the floppy to work, you'll need to create a bootable CD with at least fdisk or some other hard drive or partition tool. The older Compaq desktops used 3 disks to create the system partition (two for the partition and tools and one for the bios), so you might need more than just this one disk.