Frankensystem boots only to 'Invalid Disk' message

[kopfjaeger]

Greetings Tekkies,

I have a Mitac 5114VU Mobo, extracted from a Compaq system, labelled as a Camaro mainboard, with a factory- mounted AMD K6-2/500 MHz CPU and about 180 MB of RAM, 300W ATX form factor PSU (non-Dell, of course).

The MaxTor 30BG HD was pulled from a machine which was built around a PC Chips / Amptron M598lmr / K6-2/ 533 MHz running Win98, virgin install onto cleanly FAT32 partitioned HD.

I have changed no jumpers and during POST the RAM checks out OK.

PROBLEM:
Machine goes through POST then goes DOS blackscreen, giving error message "Invalid Boot Disk."

I am reasonably sure that the CPU and harddrive are fine and that the Win98 installation is still good. I understand that the machine might well be looking for its old configuration, but COMPAQ does not permit the standard "Del or F1 - during POST" callup of CMOS settings. Instead, it performs a self- configuration.

Trying a regular Win98 bootdisk installs the regular diagnostic programs, but again, does not allow manipuation of the BIOS settings.

Trying A:\bootdisk
c:\
cd\windows
C:\windows\win

ends up with an error message and the systems stops cold on BSOD.

Just wanting to tap into that massively parallel distributed wetware computing since I am certain _someone_ has encountered and mastered such a thing before.

Thanks,

Kopfjaeger

P.S. Hey, anybody want to buy a PC CHips m598lmr?

[Brainchild]

Try F10,or Ctrl-Alt-Esc.
BIOS Access Keys

All I have are a couple of links, hope it helps

Compaq

Mitac

Good Luck

[John Prophet]

When you DO get it booted..youll beed to boot to safe mode...run "regedit" amd delete the "hkey local machine/enum" folder.

That will delete the entries for the old hardware from the old machine and make it detect all the new hardware......it will take a while and several reboots and even then it may detect some stuff twice, like the keyboard and maybe the vid card...so you will just have to delete those particular things from device manager and let it redetect again after rebooting.


If you just slap the hard drive in without deleting that registry key, you will probably have lots of issues.

JP

[kopfjaeger]

Thanks gents, I'll look into it, applying your suggestions.

[kopfjaeger]

The Mitac 5112vu / Compaq Presario PWA Camaro is operational, however, the regedit routine seemed a bit dangerous. I understand that you can lock up a board if you incorrectly modify the registry.

Since the drive had been recently formatted, partitioned and Win98 installed, there was no data to lose. I opted for FDISK and FORMAT . It all went smoothly after that.

Thanks again for the suggestions.