Member Avatar for Botanical

I decided to try and revive an old compaq presario 2264 pc that has been collecting dust in my basement for the last 4 years. We shelved it due to a corrupted hard drive so I installed an 80GB one that I took from a dead dell computer. To the best of my knowledge the hard drive was still functional.

The main problem I think is that the hard drive has XP already installed, and the cd drive will not open on the compaq so I cannot boot from a setup disk. The computer powers on fine, and displays the COMPAQ screen, and sometimes displays the BIOS information and then just sits there staring at me as if to say "well what did you expect?"
I'm thinking that the CMOS battery might also be dead. I'll get a new battery tomorrow to test it.
The system is running about 400mhz and 256mb RAM.
Time for the electronics recycling depot, or is it salvageable?

  • 2 Contributors
  • 2 Replies
  • 161 Views
  • 1 Day Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Botanical
Member Avatar for willcomp

The first things to do for a PC that's been sitting for so long are to:

1. Replace CMOS battery (you already figured that one out)

2. Remove and reseat all cables and power connectors, and

3. Remove memory and PCI cards, clean contacts (red pencil eraser works) and reinstall

Disconnect the hard disk. Boot from a bootable CD. If you can't get optical drive operable, replace it (borrow one from another PC). It's possible removing and reseating power cables may fix the problem.

The UBCD is a good boot disk for testing PCs.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Member Avatar for Botanical

The first things to do for a PC that's been sitting for so long are to:

1. Replace CMOS battery (you already figured that one out)

2. Remove and reseat all cables and power connectors, and

3. Remove memory and PCI cards, clean contacts (red pencil eraser works) and reinstall

Disconnect the hard disk. Boot from a bootable CD. If you can't get optical drive operable, replace it (borrow one from another PC). It's possible removing and reseating power cables may fix the problem.

The UBCD is a good boot disk for testing PCs.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Thanks, shortly after I wrote this I found a new CMOS battery in my boxes of junk, and upon replacing the battery it booted up fine. Well by fine I mean it went past the BIOS screen and tried to boot from the harddrive, only it can't handle XP. Time to get a windows 98 setup disk.
And a new optical drive.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.