one of my neighbors tried to upgrade from 95 to 98 on their compaq presario it worked until it gave him an error missing database (don't know the rest he couldn't tell me) showed his image on his desktop nothing else. now he's trying to reinstall 95 but all he gets is missing operating system when he powers on we've tried 6 different hard drives went to bootdisk.com to try different boot up disks to reinstall. nothing seems to work. it shows the hard drive present in the bios but doesn't seem to want to install. i had the same problem on my computer which is an amd 1ghz with 512mb pc133 it turned out to be my power supply. i'm assuming his computer just took a dump and he needs to get a newer one but, wanted some insight on what other options i have first. i can't think of any other information you might need so feel free to ask i don't know the full error i do know that he does not have enough memory for 98 so i'm guessing that could be one of the promblems besides that how can i reinstall 95

Hi Compaq's used a quick restore cd, that came with a floppy to setup the install. In this model of compaq I believe they have a IML system partition. This is a special hidden partition where some of the bios code is stored. If you don't have the installation floppy you will need to visit HP website that runs compaq now. Hopefully it is plain enough which download you require, you will need a rompaq/sofpaq as well from there. After you have set up the system the rompaq installed, you could intall either 95 or 98.

this is true even with a different hard drive that came with the pc

Hi Not sure what you mean. You can use the floppy install disk to set up any hard drive, so long as it isn't too big for part of the bios that is on the motherboard. I'd expect from 2G to 8G may be safe to use, but don't remember off hand what a 200 MHz compaq could take as a maximum. The original hard drive should have the partitions there, even if the contents are not. You would need a non compaq and fire up a bootdisk and use fdisk to investigate the partition structure.

Pick which drive you want to use, hook it up and boot up the computer using a bootdisk. At the a:\> prompt type: fdisk and enter, Y to large disk support, if asked, then option 4. Exactly what does it say?