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Compaq Armada M300 Repairs

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6 replies

by mikecole79

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I have aquired a Compaq Armada M300 that has no OS on the hdd. I'm trying to install one, but there is no floppy and no cd with this particular little beastie. USB support is non-existant, as is network connectivity, as it doesn't have the software to support it and the BIOS is older than dirt. Anyone know what I might be able to do, other than purchasing a seriel floppy and praying that it will work?

Any ideas would be great. Thanks.

6 replies

by older mycroft

According to the spec sheet:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/10381_div/10381_div.HTML

This 'little beastie' should have a 3.5in floppy and an optical drive, both fitted to the multibay slots that are part of the chassis.

If they are presently unoccupied then someone has removed them at some prior time. Getting hold of these ancient relics nowadays would be somewhat of a quest.

According to [b]Item #4[/b] there [i]should[/i] be some form of USB ports available also.

Maybe you should have a closer look at this machine and compare the various holes in its chassis with the legend on the attached spec page?

by seanferd

Attach to another machine? Dump some setup files on it. Don't forget drivers!

Height 9.5 mm
Width 2.5 in/63.5 mm
Interface ATA

by mikecole79

I think I'm just going to have to purchase a cable to connect that little hard drive to my main computer and do exactly that. Hope the cable isn't too expensive. I'd guess it can't be too much.

Darn! Oh well. Thanks for the help.

Mike

by mikecole79

Actually, I specifically didn't mention those because on this model, they were trying to make a super-slim, easy carry kinda critter. Those removable bays that you speak of are actually mounted inside a secondary cradle of sorts that the main laptop plugs into. It has the docking bay slot on the bottom of the machine, and that sucker clicks into there. I don't have any part of that assembly, unfortunately.

by snuffy01

Ok, what I did was get a 2.5 to 3.5 inch ide adapter, then I put the small drive as the primary dive in my desktop pc. then using the bootable drive I had access to the hdd to install the OS that I chose. After I reinstalled the smaller drive in my m300, it recognized my cd drive and I was able to load all of my drivers. I chose XP works great on a 10gb hd.

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