I just bought an older laptop (compaq armada 1590dmt) and the first thing that I did was to format the hard drive and load windows 98.
I had problems on the first boot and through trail and error found that if I disabled the PCI IDE controller(changed the settings ni no IDE support) I could get windows to start. When I enabled it again windows froze on booting. Also all of my drives C, Part D, and CDROm are running in MSDOS compatability mode. The controller is a opti viper max dual pci ide controller.
My config.sys and autoexec.bat are 1 liners.
Has anybody got any ideas? I have looked on the Compaq web site but not had any luck.