Compaq Armada M700 OS install being a real pain

[Toro 45]

I just picked up one of these yesterday and it's being a real pain installing the OS. Is there some kind of Voodoo magic to get the M700 up and runing? Funky bios doesn't give much info. I think the DVD drive might be bad I keep getting errors early in the install, can't even get to the " Hit F8 to accept screen".

I've tried every disc I have win2000, XP Home, XP Pro but no love. I can boot to the DVD and it's starts to load but I always get errors within a couple of minutes. I tried another hard drive, same problem

 

[Kaervak]

It might be the DVD-ROM drive, however have you tried running Memtest? I had a similar install issue with e desktop system I was working on a while back, turned out one of the DIMMs was bad.

http://www.memtest86.com/

http://www.memtest.org/

 

[Toro 45]

Good call, it doesn't have a floppy drive but I have memtest on the Ultimate Boot CD. I'll give that a try

 

[andrewbabcock]

Dude i just sold one of those to a friend for $10 no joke.

 

[Toro 45]

LOL, the boot cd or an Armada M700?

Can't get memtest to work from the boot cd but I did find the ram under the keyboard and swapped it for 2 known good sticks and still getting errors:frown:

I put the hard drive in another lappy installed win2000 just fine put it back in the armada and no booty. I know this will work with win98 but should it work with win2000?

 

[Kaervak]

It should work fine with 2k. Probably a little better due to built in drivers. As far as swapping the drives after 2k has been installed on one system, that's a little iffy. Usually it will blue screen with INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE. Only other thing I can think of is to completely tear it apart and check any ribbon cable connections, redo the thermal grease/pad on the CPU and clean up any funk you may find in the system. If that doesn't work, a swift drop kick from a rooftop is another option.

 

[andrewbabcock]

The armada. Mine had a pentium II so we might not be talking about the same system here?