Old Compaq - help needed

[kp220]

Hi, new forum member so please be gentle with me...

I'm trying to help someone out here... I've got an old Compaq Presario - DQ079A and am trying to get it to boot with a Western Digital WD800 hard-drive on which Windows 98SE is installed.

I have had the hard drive working in another HP PC - a not very new Evo D330 and its fine, but when I try and boot in the Presario it recognises the Primary drive but then presents a Non System Disk Error - press a key to restart - message.

The Presario has an MSI/Award motherboard MS-6577 ver 2.1 and Award BIOS v6.00PG.

The pc would be used as backup for a printing machine for which we cannot find the software - other than on the hard drive in question.

Any help would be gratefully received.

Thanks for reading....

[Amma-Watson]

first of all check your HDD setup and detected correctly in CMOS setup. Make sure that Your laptop should list a HDD installed either on main page or the drives page inside the CMOS setup. it seems to me that BIOS hasn't detected the HDD properly. Otherwise it may not be connected properly.


Have you tried by resetting the BIOS to default values?

Make sure that you are not missing anything....