compaq laptop

[lynnyskynny]

I posted this under the os help, thought I would try it here too. I am working on a compaq laptop that has had windows 98 installed then some idiot that he was upgrading that but instead put ms dos 7 on it..He brought it to me yesterday.. I have tried to fdisk/mbr, boot with floppy, etc... It is not recognizing the A or D drives..How can I get into the bios on this computer, my (computer bible) says F1 or F10 but it does not work...Please help..Thanks lynnyskynny

 

[DaiShan]

try pressing the del key, or f2, or any of the f* keys for that matter, somtimes though the manufacturer will lock access to the bios so people can't screw anything up, on a desktop it normally means clearing cmos, on a laptop... dunno, never had to do that (/me waits patiently for hans007 to show up with the magic answer)

 

[lynnyskynny]

still can't get anything to work...there has to be someone out there who knows the answer.. even called compaq and they are really no help...someone please come up with a solution. thanks lynnyskynny

thanks to all of you who has tried to help, i greatly appriciate it......

 

[jschuk]

Pressing F10 when the white/grey icon appears in the upper right hand corner will get you into the BIOS. Of course if that doesn't work, you "could" have a problem with the keyboard and I worked on one Compaq that wouldn't let me into the BIOS (of course it has other problems like no IDE, shutdown before POST, etc.). I am not sure how you can boot to a floppy and not be able to recognize the A drive, but to see the D drive (CD-Rom) you need to have a bootable floppy with CD-Rom drivers. Just make a startup disk from a Windows 98 machine. Also, if that computer was bought new, it should have came with restore CD's that will reload the computer with Windows 98, no muss no fuss. Keep in mind that those restore CD's erase the HDD, but you have already fdisk'd the drive and data retrieval will be expensive at this point.