I recently acquired a Compaq Armada E500 and was happy to bring home my first win98 era device. I was lucky that one of my ac adapters for a different laptop had similar rating, so I could immediately start testing.

Unfortunately the laptop wouldn’t boot so I suspected a faulty hard drive. I also noticed that the cd drive would not open when clicking on the eject button. Even if I opened it using the tiny whole and put a cd rim in there, I couldn’t detect any activity from the drive. The drive is removable, so I extracted it and had a look, but couldn’t see anything obvious.

Accidentally, I turned on the device without the drive installed in the drive bay, and what do you know, the laptop booted into windows Xp! So the hard drive was fine, but there is something with the drive.

Has anyone got a clue how I can find out if the problem lies on the bay or the drive? I also tried installing the cd drive while booted in windows, but it freezes for a bit and soon after shows a bsod. I’m trying to source a replacement drive, hopefully, I think many HP drives of the era are compatible and also cheaper, but I’d prefer if I can already debug this issue somehow.