Please help with HD troubles

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childsid

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Hi,
i hope you can help me, I'm in a real fix. I need to put a new hard drive into a compaq 5280 laptop. I put in the HD and the laptop registers it's size and that it's there. I have a windows98 program on cd. I have made a startup disk for win98 on floppy. The laptop will not boot to a cd, it gives an error message: disk i/o error (laptop has swappable cd & floppy.
I put in the startup floppy and get to the point where I fdisk the hard drive and format it(it says I have 1 partition, if that's ok), then I can't do anything because I can't run the CD. I don't have OEM drivers for the laptop but I do have a restore CD that came with it, if I can just get the laptop to read it. I've checked HP support and they don't have much to help. i've checked every user manual and they don't help either.
please help.
Jim
 
hello childsid, i'm not familar with laptops but i've had that sort of trouble before. master boot record was deleted. access the bios enable cd rom and floppy set the first boot device as cd rom
if you have xp reboot from it..xp should ask if you want to install
it should format the hard drive first and then install itself
but i suppose 98 does the same thing

hope this is some help
 
you said the hal word micro,, i still get shudders thinking about that file. i did'nt want to mention it earlier. on boot up i had missing hal file i found one fix on the internet and was told it's easier to replace your spinal cord than to replace a corrupt hal file
if someone had just told me to boot from a windows cd and reformat i would'nt have wasted 2 weeks freaking out
 
Thanks Folks,
I got it. I found a download on the net for a boot disk on floppy that installs cd drivers even if it's not present. I boot it to the floopy, then put it in hybernation, swap floppy for cd drive and run setup on win98 to install the new op.
Jim
 
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