Hi,

New to this forum, hope you can help me, with this problem it feels as if i've been banging my head against a brick wall for the last hour!

I bought a Compaq iPaq Desktop PC with no OS installed. It also doesn't have a cdrom drive or floppy (just a blanking plate in multibay slot) and the BIOS only gives me an option to boot from Hard Drive or Network. First I tried plugging in an external CD-Rom drive, but without windows installed, it didn't even detect it, let alone let me install from it. So next I tried your guide. I managed to get as far as formatting the drive whilst it is a slave in second pc, but after that things went a bit pear shaped. I burnt a cd with the DOS 7.10 files on it, and inserted it into the cd drive and rebooted with the compaq hdd on ide channel 1 as master. It didn't find a boot record from the cdrom. So I tried putting the dos 7.10 boot disk files on to a floppy, but the extracted files were too large to fit on one.

Anyone know how to get DOS on to the hard drive or can anyone give me a tutorial like post showing how to do it. I would be eternally grateful, this is seriously making me go mad!

Cheers,

AlexGray104.

Just to add...

I have also tried skipping DOS and just putting the bootable xp mce disc in on startup and then pulling the power at the first restart. I then plugged hdd back into compaq, booted and got an "NTLDR.dll Missing. Press any key to restart" error. Same thing happens with 2k. Should I try loading on 98, as that is from the 9x kernel and not the NT one, or would I get a similar result?