I'm assisting a friend w/ an older (633) Compaq. The HD will not boot and cannot start in safe mode w/ startup disc (It gives the 1720-imminent failure error and hangs). I've installed a new HD (installed win98SE) and can read some files from the old drive. I cannot get the Recovery CD to work on the old drive as it will not boot and it will not operate on the new drive. Any ideas on how to get his recovery disc programs installed on the new drive?

When installing a new hard drive on a Compaq, you have to download and run a utility to set up the new hard drive. Check the Compaq website.

From the information you give i think you have installed a brand new HD.
What i have heard and read, on the original HD there are two partitions, one with specific information of the system (D) and the normal C partition.
If you installed a brand new HD in this system, this partition with this specific information of the system is not there.
What i have heard and read, this is the reason why the recovery cd does not work. Maybe there is a way to install it manually by browsing to the folders which you want to install.

Hope you can do something with this info.

Jan

Hi Dom, hi everyone,

I confirm fred and HAL-03's writtings:
You need that "ghost partition" to enter the Bios setup!
Go to CompaQ's Website to download the needed utility.

-> to other readers: when Fdisking, never delete what you could think is lost space!!!

Have a good day,
Gérard from Paris, France

From the Compaqs I have worked on I see there should be no problem running the Compaq recovery disk on the new drive. It will create an partitons needed and also format both partitions. It is a teadious process but it does work. My question is what is stopping it from working? It could be a corrupted recovery disk. I have seen that before. Another problem could be is how many cd rom drives in the computer? When there are more than one, in dos mode they reverse themselves. In otherwords, when the dos screen tells you to insert the recovery disk into (E/DVD drive) for example, you should insert it into: F/cdrw drive. This might just be the problem.

Gérard,

Good morning. Learned a long time ago to leave that little partition alone. This problem rears it's ugly head at every hdd replacement and fdisk/format.

First Compaq I ever laid my hands on was a 133-MHz laptop, which I fearlessly fdisked & formatted.

I know better now.

LOL

Dave

Hi SkipCox, Dave, hi everyone,

I purchased many CompaQ comps for my company, from 86286 16 MHz to Pentium II 350 MHz... I realized there was "lost space" at the time of 486DX266... Win3.1!
Too timorous to fdisk-3 it! ;-)

Have a good day,
Gérard from Paris, France

Hi Dom,

How is going your problem? what about Terri's suggestions?

Have a good day,
Gérard from Paris, France

Does the recovery CD have all of the programs or is there another cd (Restore CD)?

Does the recovery CD have all of the programs or is there another cd (Restore CD)?

It depends on the model some compaqs have two or more restore disk and some have just one.My compaq has one and my sisters has one.About the partitions i created a partition on my sisters computer just to see if the recovery would delete it.Compaq said it would.But it didn't.Also in another e-mail compaq said for me to create a partition then the disk would put recovery files on it and name it SYSTEM.SAV.It did no such.

Had to order the Quick Restore CD's from compaq ($10). Now it's restored but slower than dirt. It takes 7-8 minutes just to boot up.