I have a Compaq Armada M700 and I have been trying to recover it. I put the recovery disc into the laptop and boot it up. Everything works fine, until it asks me to remove the disc and restart. It restarts to a message, "Missing Operating System." Thus, I put the disc back in and go through it all over again, but I get the same message. What am I doing wrong?

recovery disk??
is that a floppy or cd?? you don't say.
if its a floppy, its only a boot disk. if its a win98 install disk, your not installing properly.
you must set the bios to boot from cdrom.
then, the install will proceed aftwr thw format.

I boot it up from the CD.

Have you done any of the following at some time?:

Replaced the HD

Reformatted

Otherwise it's odd the the recovery disk didn't work.

DerekW

I put the recovery disc and go through the whole installation process. At the very beginning I had a semi-functional operating system that required recovery. After it starts downloading some files it asks me to remove the disc and it reboots, but when it reboots it goes to a screen that reads "Missing Operating System." I then put the recovery disc back in and boot it up then go through the whole process again. The recovery disc deleted everything I think.

Has the laptop got a floppy drive?

DerekW

I do not have a floppy drive. Is there a way to create a boot disk from a CD? I looked into that, but it looked very complicated.

Without a floppy drive it gets messy even if you have a W95 CD. We had a long post on here a while back along those lines which got nowhere.

It obviously screwed up the proper recovery. I'm lost for any neat ideas so lets hope someone else can suggest something.

I suppose you could make up a "Damn Small Linux" CD which would at least allow you to look at the file structure to see what is there (or not there) and maybe even backup some of your stuff. A BartPE CD made on XP should also allow you to do this "Windows style" as I've recently discovered on W98SE.

DerekW

You can download "ready to burn" bootable (ISO) disc images for various DOS/Win versions from AllBootDisks, for those who are haplessly without a diskette drive

If nothing else, you can restore the boot function to your hard drive by entering:

sys c:

... from a DOS boot (should see a 'system transferred' message)

That should get the drive booting to DOS, but won't necessarily restore Windows functionality, unless that's the only issue - otherwise, in order to attempt any file salvage you'd want to pursue one of the bootable 'live' CDs suggested by Derek, if there are indeed files to salvage

I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter.

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