[Shadow-X-]

Hey, my brother in Japan gave my dad his old laptop since he bought a better one off a friend in Japan, and now I'm trying to set everything up so that it works better. It is an old clunker, a compaq, P133 w/ 80 megs ram. I am going to try to reformat the HD and start-a-fresh, but I cannot figure out anything about it's bootup process and such. It has a docking station,and I tried sticking in the Win 98 (Japanese version) into the CD-ROM (on the docking station), but it does not ask me if I want to boot from the CDROM or the HDD, which shows that it is only booting from either the A: or the C:. Ihave been trying to search for a gerneal notebook FAQ page with no success. Anyone know of any page that might help me get through this process?
_________________
Just remember, when in doubt, even monkeys fall from trees sometimes.

[[Shizo]]

WHAT! There must be BIOS man! You just have to find it hehe. In Notebooks they hide it with a nice logo screen, but try F1, F3, Ctrl, Del, and whatever to get into BIOS. Then set boot sequence right and try the CD again.
If it doesn't work, do a regular A: floppy DOS boot and install from there..

[Drunken Monkey]

Does win98 support disk bootage? Maybe you should just start it up with a book disk.
_________________
"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity" - Sigmund Freud

[eyalyab]

yep. like shizo said, there is always the bios. if its ibm thinkpad it must be F1. on some computers its F10 or F8 try all the F's sonsofbia* oh and like shizo said it can be DEL too, or in a laptop it can be a combination of "Function" key and one of the F's. usually there are pics on the F's. search for manual of your notepad brand. there must be an option to change the boot sequence.

about the boot. with nero or clonecd or other burning wares you can make any cd bootable. so if you want, you can take a non-bootable win98 or 98se cd (which is the best os for a p133 imho) and re-burn it as a bootable win98 cd. i've done it with an xp cd.

another way, i remember my uncle used to do this, is with a program i dont remember its name and the serial port on the laptop and another pc. you connect a pc to the laptop through the serial port and with that program (dos based) you sorta clone/copy and shit to and from the laptop. its slow as hell though through a serial port. just make a bootable win98 cd.
bye.

[Shadow-X-]

Oie, after some searching on the Compaq website, for the laptop that I have (Armada 4130T), it's F10 when there is a blinking white cursor at the top right when booting, unfortunately, i dont have that, which means that the special boot-up bios thing isnt installed properly on it's own partition.... which means i have to re-partition the HD after formatting, install that software, and get it working... seems like it's gonna be some fun work to get this laptop started a-fresh.
_________________
Just remember, when in doubt, even monkeys fall from trees sometimes.