won't boot; not even with boot disk...

[Shuvit]

Heya, my first post here, came here through bootdisk.com...

I've got an Compaq Armada 1500c, 180 MB Ram. I bought it second hand, and it was working perfectly well. Then there was winamp, and it screwed my sound drivers. I installed new drivers but they wouldn't work. So, i decided to completely remove windows ME and install windows XP. But, the auto-boot cd didn't work. I installed the XP-setup and booted again. This time I could enter the setup, but it would freeze at 'inspecting hardware'. Because at that time i fixed my sound there was no need for me to install XP anymore.

Then the problem started; when I would boot there would be a boot menu; i didn't want this and found on deja.com that it was an old XP file. I edited it twice but it wouldn't fix the problem, so I deleted it. Having in mind that I could always boot with my boot disk.
Now it starts the laptop; then it says 'corrupt boot.ini file; booting from default c:\windows\ (wich is my windows ME directory)... inserting a boot disk has no effect.

Right now I'm at the point where I have no clue in what to do anymore.. so this is my last resort; after this I'll have to go to the expensive computer shop for them to fix it (I'm a poor student and it will cost me probably as much as the whole new laptop costed... sigh)

so I just hope someone in here has a good idea...

thnx in advance,

joren bredman

[jcolling]

can u get into the bios and change it to boot from cd rom first - if so put in ur xp disk and when prompted hit any key to boot from cd - hit any key - u should then be able to do a clean install of xp - if u need more detailed help - post back

[Shuvit]

The problem is with this compaq, it's not possible to get into the BIOS by pressing F10 (normally)... I downloaded a disk from compaq (or HP for that matters) to access the BIOS through a floppy disk... ...only the BIOS doesn't read the floppy disk so I cannot access BIOS.
Is there any way of manually (without software) resetting my BIOS? I read somewhere it might be possible to remove a battery on the motherboard or something that would flush the BIOS and resetting it in it's original state...