Compaq Presario

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?

In article <39oci391i68t23r64j4vn99ckasldm9h5u@4ax.com>, Terry says...
> 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.

--
Conor

I'm not prejudiced. I hate everyone equally.