Compaq Presario

[Terry]

I am trying to get a Presario to work. It came from a friend.

When I try to boot the machine, it will display the Compaq splash
screen then go black and show a cursor at the top left indefinitely.
The floppy light also runs continuously.

When I go to the bios, it seems that the bios does not recognize the
f10 key.

The first thing I tried was disabling the floppy. When I change the
setting to disabled is am supposed to press f10 to accept. Pressing
F10 doesn't do anything. I can press escape and keep looking at bios
settings but I can't change anything.

The second thing I tried to do was put the floppy as the third device,
but without being able to hit f10 I can't do this either.

Suggestions?

 

[Conor]

I am trying to get a Presario to work. It came from a friend.

When I try to boot the machine, it will display the Compaq splash
screen then go black and show a cursor at the top left indefinitely.
The floppy light also runs continuously.

When I go to the bios, it seems that the bios does not recognize the
f10 key.

The first thing I tried was disabling the floppy. When I change the
setting to disabled is am supposed to press f10 to accept. Pressing
F10 doesn't do anything. I can press escape and keep looking at bios
settings but I can't change anything.

The second thing I tried to do was put the floppy as the third device,
but without being able to hit f10 I can't do this either.

Suggestions?

Older Compaqs used to have a hidden partition on the HDD which was
effectively where CMOS settings were stored and if you changed the
drive, you had to restore this with a utility from Compaq.