Hello, and let me say thanks in advance for this forum opportunity, for this problem that I have, to post this question here. I have a Compaq Presario 5340. What happened is this: One day it would not boot up...something about a corrupted exporer.exe. So being the innovated guy that I am, I thought I would just re-install windows 98. There is a 80 gig hard drive that a friend installed for me but after getting it back I turned it on and I had 4 different drives. I thought that was weird and difficult to understand so when this problem with the corrupted explorer.exe thing happened I thought I would reformat, make one partition and then reinstall windows 98. So I used a floppy boot disk to do all that but afterwards couldn't find the recovery disc or windows 98 disk. I also have another computer, HP Pavilion 8565C, with recovery disks. My question is this: Can I switch hard drives? Will the hard drive in the HP work in the Compaq. Will it boot in windows? If not how can I install windows 98 back in the Compaq? The Compaq is for my grandchildren which they use to play games when the come over. Thanks again.

I don't quite see a point in swapping drives. If you do, keep in mind that windows must be installed on the box it is going to run on.

Likely the Compaq has 'recovery' disks, not plain vanilla w98.

If you decide to go your own way with plain w98 keep in mind that it's limited to about 63GB; so you will need the newer fdisk.

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If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

M2

Are you asking if you can temporarily put the compaq drive in the HP, use the HP restore disk to install the OS and then put the drive back in the compaq? The main problem with that is when it first boots up after you've put it back in the compaq. The OS will see all the new hardware and start setting it up. At some point it will ask you to insert the 98 cd in order to find the necessary drivers. Since you don't have the 98 cd you'll be stuck there.

That's also the same result you'd get if you put the existing HP drive in the compaq.

You might want to check on ebay for 98 disks. I think they're fairly cheap there.