Hello and good day to all of you lovely people here at my favorite IT site.

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Could someone help me find a set of diagnostics/startup disks for an old Compaq LTE 286 Laptop running DOS 3.31? We have all but the diagnostics disk for this set.

I have searched the archives here, and found someone from 1999 who said they had a copy, but their username is no longer valid when I tried emailing them. I also tried eBay as one tech suggested, but searching all categories returned no results.

Surely one of you has a copy of it somewhere...I have to have faith! This is an emergency. It's for a F&AM (Free and Accepted Masons) brother who uses these old laptops to program Two way radios for the Police, Fire and EMS services here in our County.
He took his HD out of one of these old laptops, (the back light display was fried on the old one) and placed his hard drive in an another Compaq EXACTLY like his old one, I mean exact match (OS, motherboard even right down to the exact model number of his other one, but now we can't even get to a DOS prompt to get the hard drive to work. It keeps asking for the diagnostics disk, which we cannot find. We have found the OTHER three that came with the set of four, (of course) but the diagnostics disk has flown the coup...so to speak. Any help will be greatly and sincerely rewarded and appreciated. This man has been a cornerstone and pillar of our community for over fifty years! Could someone point me in the right direction to get this system to work? Maybe there is a trick we are missing to get the DOS 3.31 already on his old hard drive to boot up and work.

With humility and all warmth and Sincerity,

Eric

****UPDATE****

We have found the diagnostics disc, and inserted it, but even though it's his old hard drive in this new machine..it is still giving us a "non system disc" error. How can this be? He paid for this operating system years ago, and still has all the originals, including the missing one we just found. Are we missing something here? Possibly a technique to get his old HD to work? He did change the CMOS battery before he swapped HD's, could this be the root of the problem, and how could we do a workaround? Any ideas?

Thanks guys

Have you tried going into the cmos and see if it is configured correctly for boot device since you have reset the configuration when you replaced the cmos battery?

Thank you for your reply!

I have not, I know little about these old machines...could you give a little intruction on exactly how to do this? I would be forever grateful. Tell me every step as you would a newbie. Please?

Warmly,

Eric

I'm fairly certain the only way to set the cmos is with the diagnostic disk so if he can't get it to boot then he's stuck there. But just in case you might want to see what happens if you tap F10 while it's posting the memory.

Is the floppy drive reading the diagnostic disk? Are you sure the disk and floppy drive are good?

What version is the diagnostic disk? You may need to make a new disk.

The latest diagnostic disk that'll work for that model is version 8. The file to download is sp0308.zip. Here's a text description:

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp0000-0500/sp0308.txt

SP0308.zip isn't on the ftp site anymore. But you can download it here:

http://members.driverguide.com/driv...

Unzip it and run the extracted file. (Note: It's made for a 720K disk. So if you're creating the diagnostic disk in a 1.44 drive and using a 1.44 disk you should probably tape over the sensor hole on the disk. That way the drive will see it as 720K. Then format the disk as 720K. The 1.44 drive will probably default to formatting it as 720K since the sensor hole is covered so you shouldn't need to use the /F:size switch. Then run sp0308.exe.)

I would like to sincerely thank you for your help, we will give this a try and post back.

Warmly,
Eric

Turned out it was simply a bad floppy drive. Thanks!

It'd probably be a good idea to download the setup file just in case you ever need it.

You'll need to set the drive type for the hard drive when you run the setup program. The number will probably be stamped on the hard drive. If not you'll have to compare the C/H/S parameters of the hard drive and see what matches the available drive types.