Compaq Portable II - Restoration Problem, Help requested

[Geoffrey Reed]

If you take the floppy drive and hook it up to another pc, can you read or
boot from those disks?

Did you put those disks into a windows 2000/xp or newer pc?  Possibly as far
back as win 98/95 (I don't remember when they started) the boot sector gets
overwritten if you put a non write protected disk in the drive in windows.


On 1/1/10 5:08 PM, "Tom Gardner" <thomas.gardner at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> I have 2 Portable IIs in fairly good shape, except that both of them, one an
> HDD model and one with two FDs.  Both run Memory Check and POST but fail to
> boot.
> 
> During POST they both give a
> "162 System Options Not Set - Run Setup" message
> but when I continue I get a
> "Non-system disk or disk error" message
> with several known good original disks (Compaq Setup Disk, PCDOS 3.3 StartUp
> disk, MSDOS 2.0 disk)
> 
> Sometimes I get the message, "Disk Boot Failure"
> 
> I tried replacing the 1987 battery in the HDD Portable II with a fresh
> battery purchased recently at Frys and had no change in the failure mode.
> 
> I have two HDD/FDD controller cards and tried both in the HDD Portable II
> with no change in the failure mode.
> 
> If I listen to the boot process, it sounds like it cannot read the boot
> sector.  That is, I can hear one seek (or maybe a rezero) to a single
> location and then no more.  As I recall during a DOS boot, you can hear
> multiple seeks as, first the boot sector loads and then the boot loader (in
> the boot sector) loads MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS and the FAT.  Since I never hear
> any seeking I suspect the boot sector cannot be read.
> 
> I find it surprising that two machines having very different histories will
> fail in the same way.  BTW, they are not even the same type FDDs, one is a
> "push button" type and the other is a "lidded" type.
> 
> I am hoping that I am making some sort of operator error which can easily be
> corrected.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> Thanks and Happy New Years.
> 
> Tom
> 
>