I just purchased yesterday a Compaq Presario laptop 12XL126 and started my Compaq laptop ritual of de-compaqqing the laptop. This involves blowing away the extra 1.33 GB partition used for system recovery. I was not concerned because as like my other previous 1200 series Presario laptop, this new Presario had a system recovery CD that would put it OS back the way I found it.

No worries man. So I disabled all those weird Compaq startup programs. I uninstalled all those strange Compaq programs you wonder what they do. I upgraded the laptop to WinME to be fully modern with the times and all (the laptop came preloaded with WIN98SE).

Well I decided that Windows ME was NOT for that laptop after all. Strange driver issues with my NIC and weird system .dll screwups started happening. hmmmmm. So I blew away the primary partition with Windows on it to restore the computer (still confident the restore CD would magically put it all back like my old Presario) and lo and behold the restore CD tells me that I cannot restore my system as the d: partition with the restore stuff is missing. There is only 2.9MB of boot stuff on the "EMERGENCY RECOVERY CD" itself. No way around it. Could probably get Linux on it if I wanted wanted. Not even drivers on the Compaq site to say load up your own version of Windows if you wanted. I was apparently not supposed to get rid of that second partition if I wanted to keep a copy of my OS.

(sigh)

So I emailed Compaq and they told me what to do.There is a solution.

(patience)

For FREE (plus shipping and the obviously monetarily worthless time I will spend on hold) I can call Compaq M-F 7-7 at 1-800-841-2761 (option 3) and order (drum roll please) FOR FREE the "RESTORE CD" and this will really load the system back on the laptop as this CD actually has drivers and an Windows and those other good Compaq things on it.

So right now it is as useful as a rock. It says, "operating system not found." I didn't read the instructions until it was too late.

I think I will load up Redhat 7.0 on it while I wait for them to send me the operating system.

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