I have a old compaq lte 5100 that I recently formatted. It had windows 98 on it a work fine but I wanted to put 3.1 back on it because it was faster. Anyhow I tried to boot to the dos setup disk "Invalid System Disk.." which is wrong I checked the disk on another computer it is fine. I dont have the cdrom for the laptop just the multibay floppy. Can someone give me a idea how to boot to that floppy. I can see that it is access the floppy just not booting. Thanks

In order to install W3.1 you should install DOS 5 or 6. You would have had to format it FAT16, 2GB max partitions. Startover using a DOS boot disk and redo FDISK and FORMAT.

Well I am trying to install dos 6, but it will not boot to the floppy disk drive. I am trying to figure out why it wont boot to the floppy. Is there something special that has to be done to the drive since it is removable?

Just taking a shot. At power up go into setup and change the order your computer boots up. Sound like it is set to look at C: and then D: (CDROM) but not the A: drive. Knowing what version and type of bios is on the computer would help with a click here and then there answer to get you to the boot seq....but being an older computer it should be easy to find. Hope this of some help. Raintree

Hi, As mentioned, ensure that it tries floppy first. Also, that the FDD type os set right. That box may have a choice of 720K / 1.44M and may default to 720K. If no joy, clean the FDD. If still no joy, go to another machine or two and make boot floppies. Ofetn the head tracking is just different enough that a floppy written in one will not read in the other. Once you find two drives which like each other, get a 6.22 boot maker at www.bootdisk.com and make the disk on the 'compatible' box BTW, you prbably don't need a DOS setup disk. A good boot disk has pretty much everything you need. HTH M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

Well tried different boot disk no luck. Thanks for the info though. Has anyone heard of using a laptop hard drive cable/adapter to make the hard drive bootable from outside the laptop?

You can get an adapter to plug a laptop drive into a standard IDE cable. Plug it into a suitable desktop, partition, format with /s to put the system files on, then copy all the files off the boot disk. Should now boot when back in the laptop, and you can go ahead and put everything else on... I hope!