aHumanError
Baseband Member
- Messages
- 37
- Location
- UK
Hi.
I found an old Compaq Armada laptop I had from back in the day and decided to try an restore it somewhat.
Unfortunately the old HDD was dead so I bought a 40GB replacement (one of the lowest capacity 40 pin IDE's I could find at the time) with the plan of just partitioning it up.
However the fdisk only recognises about 7554MB, I tried partition magic and even Acronis OS Selector (which has a partitioner) both threw up errors or only recognised 7554MB.
So plan B. I set the HDD up on Windows 10 instead (Partitioned/formatted) and finally it then works OK, I can install Windows 98 and even the 20gig partition is accessible. However Scandisk reports weird errors, says it fixes them but they come up again next time. And when installing certain software can throw a weird path error or two (Although not certain if related).
I checked the BIOS to find that it has completely wrong readings for the HDD and also shows as 8062MB instead (Pic attached for fun). So I checked for a BIOS update and there isn't one past 1999 (which it was already "up to date").
So I'm thinking that either the drive is still too new for the computer, the capacity is beyond it's limit, or a bit of both. I tried sourcing an older HDD but they seem pretty rare, and the ones there are expensive for what it is. Like £40 for a 5GB drive!
Anybody know of a workaround or somewhere I can pick up a cheaper HDD?
I found an old Compaq Armada laptop I had from back in the day and decided to try an restore it somewhat.
Unfortunately the old HDD was dead so I bought a 40GB replacement (one of the lowest capacity 40 pin IDE's I could find at the time) with the plan of just partitioning it up.
However the fdisk only recognises about 7554MB, I tried partition magic and even Acronis OS Selector (which has a partitioner) both threw up errors or only recognised 7554MB.
So plan B. I set the HDD up on Windows 10 instead (Partitioned/formatted) and finally it then works OK, I can install Windows 98 and even the 20gig partition is accessible. However Scandisk reports weird errors, says it fixes them but they come up again next time. And when installing certain software can throw a weird path error or two (Although not certain if related).
I checked the BIOS to find that it has completely wrong readings for the HDD and also shows as 8062MB instead (Pic attached for fun). So I checked for a BIOS update and there isn't one past 1999 (which it was already "up to date").

So I'm thinking that either the drive is still too new for the computer, the capacity is beyond it's limit, or a bit of both. I tried sourcing an older HDD but they seem pretty rare, and the ones there are expensive for what it is. Like £40 for a 5GB drive!
Anybody know of a workaround or somewhere I can pick up a cheaper HDD?