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

R

ripthesystem

Senior member
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
 
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.
 
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
 
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.
 
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...
 
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
 
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.
 
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