Got an ancient Compaq Presario 1246 laptop that just says I/O error when it tries to boot up. A bit of googling suggests that it's either the hard drive or the battery. Anyone point me in the right direction ? I can probably change the battery easily enough but don't want to start mucking around with the hard drive as I'm no pc expert.

Edited 13 February, 201115 yr by Paul007

Do you mean the laptop battery or the small cmos battery on the motherboard? I cant see why the main battery would cause an I/O error, so it would probably be easier to get to the hard drive.

Surely that machine is well over 10 years old now? Give up and get rid IMO.

Surely the laptop will work with the battery removed and running directly off the mains

via the adapter cable (mains to laptop) like my old Toshiba A60 does.??

I'd imagine a dead disk is pretty likely, too. Assuming it's the one with a K6-2 processor, I'd also second the notion that it's not worth it anyway - trying to find another disk that it will accept (smaller than 10Gb, for starters), and that works, is going to be a bit of a challenge given that they'll all be second-hand and similarly ancient.

My junk collection contains a Packard Bell of similar vintage and specification (500MHz K6-2, 128Mb RAM), and it struggles with even just browsing the internet these days. It's only still around because it's usable for certain things running a cut-down Linux distribution, and I don't like chucking out things that are technically fully functional.

The only way I could imagine a failed CMOS battery causing an I/O error is if there's a BIOS setting for the HDD mode (normal/large/LBA or similar) which has reset to default. I would think it's pretty unlikely that a laptop would have this option, though.

Thanks...I've stuck it on fleabay