[SOLVED] Can't get to bios on an ancient laptop

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wilmath

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Nov 5, 2016
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The laptop is a Compaq Contura 4/25. I think the cpu is a 486 and has a whopping 16 mgs of ram. It was built in the early 90's. I bought it in the early 2000's and dos was the os. I installed autocad r12 and had many years of good service from it. I moved on but still had a lot of data on it and I would like to get it, plus tryout autocad .

The drive is different from modern drives and is connected to the motherboard with 46 pins.

It powers on and makes noises like it is looking for a boot drive but does not boot up. I get error messages saying it needs to be setup and another error message saying the date and time needs to be setup.

I tried pressing the delete key to get to the bios and also the f1 and f10 keys but it is stuck on the page with the errors. I am not sure the board is recognizing the keyboard.

Any ideas?
Thanks!
 
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wilmath said:
The laptop is a Compaq Contura 4/25. I think the cpu is a 486 and has a whopping 16 mgs of ram. It was built in the early 90's. I bought it in the early 2000's and dos was the os. I installed autocad r12 and had many years of good service from it. I moved on but still had a lot of data on it and I would like to get it, plus tryout autocad .

The drive is different from modern drives and is connected to the motherboard with 46 pins.

It powers on and makes noises like it is looking for a boot drive but does not boot up. I get error messages saying it needs to be setup and another error message saying the date and time needs to be setup.

I tried pressing the delete key to get to the bios and also the f1 and f10 keys but it is stuck on the page with the errors. I am not sure the board is recognizing the keyboard.

Any ideas?
Thanks!
Click to expand...
It should be 43 pins and 4 jumpers if standard IDE connector, but you never know with old Compaq models. Take a look at these pictures for the standard IDE 2.5" (and 3.5" so look closely) pinouts for a ribbon cable. And it should only have 4MB of ram. Have you tried booting from a DOS floppy?
 
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wilmath said:
ex-bubblehead, do you know what the key combination was to get to the bios?
Click to expand...
As posted above, tap F10 after power on. There is also the distinct possibility that the CMOS has become corrupted due to a dead battery. This will cause the laptop not to boot.

Instructions for dealing with this can be found here:
https://remember.the-aero.org/aero/cmos-help.htm

Doubtless most (if not all) of the links are dead now but give it a read anyway.
 
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Thanks ex-bubblehead, you were right, the links are dead. I am going to have to find the software to flash the bios, however I think I am going to try and figure out a way to hook up the drives to my desktop. I checked again and the connection is 44 pins not 46.

Thanks everybody for the help. I thought computers lasted forever....
 
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wilmath said:
I think I am going to try and figure out a way to hook up the drives to my desktop. I checked again and the connection is 44 pins not 46.
Click to expand...
It is an 44-pin (-1 pin) IDE drive and the extra 4 pins are jumpers.
I think Compaq used Quantum HDD.
You could get a cheap USB to IDE adapter to connect the HDD to a computer.

wilmath said:
I thought computers lasted forever....
Click to expand...
Nature take is course. Humidity, heat.... the environment could shorten life span of components.
Those HDD had a rubber on the actuator...that rubber will eventually melt and prevent the HDD read-write arm from moving properly.

In a hard drive polarity could change the data stored leading to corrupt data.
You could replace the coin shaped battery to see if the error goes away.

Could you post a image of the error.
 
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