Compaq QuickRestore [SUPPORT]
I own a Compaq Presario 5660 PC. It runs a copy of Windows 98 SE that I downloaded off this website, but recently I have found the original restoration CD in the basement. I quickly make ISOs for historical preservation, and then popped the CD into the computer.
When I boot the CD it comes up with a menu with:
When I select QuickRestore, the computer hangs. Then I try to manually starting the program by using a boot floppy and the command prompt. The restoration program starts. It goes through the partitioning and formatting of the HDD, then begins copying the files.
Everything goes well until about 85%, it gets stuck and says a file cannot be found. I hit retry then it skips all the way to 100% and says the restoration was successful. When I reboot the computer, I get a whole bunch of errors, and it took me forever to start Windows. When I get to the desktop, I look in the C: drive to see what is wrong, and I find out the entire 'Program Files' directory wasn't copied from the CD.
I took the CD out and looked for scratches, but the CD looks perfectly fine, and all the files on the CD seem to be not corrupt as well. Is there something I might have done wrong that could have prevented the computer from completing the restoration successfully?
When I boot the CD it comes up with a menu with:
- Memory Diagnostics
- QuickRestore
- Command Prompt
- Start Windows
When I select QuickRestore, the computer hangs. Then I try to manually starting the program by using a boot floppy and the command prompt. The restoration program starts. It goes through the partitioning and formatting of the HDD, then begins copying the files.
Everything goes well until about 85%, it gets stuck and says a file cannot be found. I hit retry then it skips all the way to 100% and says the restoration was successful. When I reboot the computer, I get a whole bunch of errors, and it took me forever to start Windows. When I get to the desktop, I look in the C: drive to see what is wrong, and I find out the entire 'Program Files' directory wasn't copied from the CD.
I took the CD out and looked for scratches, but the CD looks perfectly fine, and all the files on the CD seem to be not corrupt as well. Is there something I might have done wrong that could have prevented the computer from completing the restoration successfully?
Comments
Perhaps the rest can be copied in from the CD manually? Old OEM stuff was a bit fiddly, and so were drives and discs.
If not, you might try burning the ISO to a fresh blank CD-R, and then trying to restore from that. An older CD drive can get finicky about reading slightly damaged disks while other have no problems.
Another thing to try is to wipe the drive. Either with a Linux CD and use "dd" to wipe the drive, or use the DBAN cd. The small DOS based MaxLLF is also excellent for wiping IDE drives of that era. Wiping the drive will force any bad sectors to re-map.
On some Compaqs, after wiping the drive you may need to install the Compaq Diagnostics, whcich goes in a special partition.
I forgot to say that there seems to be two disks that are identical. One of the disks gives me a "Missing terminate volumn in the ISO file". And the second one gives me the same error. The disks don't appear to be scratched or damaged in any way.
As for copying the files manually, the files are spread across different folders that are very cryptic and hard to understand. There are a mix of .zip and .cab and other wonky file compression formats that would make it too difficult to copy myself.
And for the partition, I don't know there was a recovery partition, but if there was, then it's long gone, because I wiped the entire drive clean about 2 times. I wouldn't know how to get that partition back.
Those recovery environments were finniky and often times based upon just extracting random cabinets onto your disk. Is there any .inf file that dictates how the setup/recovery is to be ran?
I could be wrong I have been drinking a little bit