Compaq Deskpro won't boot up?

OK here's the problem - I have an old Compaq Deskpro which has been unused in my cellar for about a year. I would keep it either for the parts or for my daughter and I went to switch on today and it brought up Compaq 2000 32 ram and then just a flashing cursor. I tried to boot up with a W98 startup disk (thats the system on it) and it was ok. Any suggestions as to the problem and a solution please?

For info - it is 32 ram, W98, 1.5 gb hd, with cd rom and internal Windows modem.

Many thanks.

stepheno

 

My guess is the OS or partition table is corrupt. Using a Windows 98 boot disk, boot the machine. Type the following at the DOS prompt:

sys a: c:

and press enter. Reboot without the boot disk and see what happens.

By the way, Windows 98 needs at least 32 Megs of RAM for best efficiency.

 

Thanks Alex - I'll give it a whirl.

stepheno

 

Hi Alex - I tried that but still just the flashing cursor. I've decided to reformat the hd and to clean install W98 and see if that works. I knew about the 32 meg ram for w98 - it did work ok but it tended to crawl a bit.

Thanks for the help.

stepheno

 

That old drive was probably FDisked in an old system, not the one it is in now. You need to do more than just reformat. You need to delete the current partition, via FDisk, then recreate it and then reformat.

 

Thanks for that.

stepheno