Need help - Compaq Armada E500 just won't boot Windows 98
Hello,
Recently I rescued a Compaq Armada E500 from ending up in a landfill. It originally had Windows XP installed, but the performance of it was kind of sluggish, so I wanted to instead turn it into a dedicated Windows 98SE machine for running old games and DOS programs. But even though this laptop seemingly is made for Windows 98SE, it does not want to boot into it, on a completely fresh install even. It just gets hung on the splash screen with no drive activity. Same thing happens when trying to boot into safe mode. I tried re-installing it a few times, and sometimes it even gets hung on the 'Getting ready to start Windows for the first time' screen (that's where I'm at while writing this, matter of fact). What doesn't help is that this behaviour is inconsistent. Very rarely it does actually load into the desktop on safe mode, and I even got it to load a grand total of two times in normal mode, but those were just a fluke.
The hardware in this laptop is seemingly OK. I ran memtest86 5 times, and it passed every single time (although it did have trouble loading it the first few times...). The HDD, while it had been heavily used, didn't report any SMART errors or bad sectors. CD-ROM drive is seemingly fine as well. Only real thing that might affect it is that it doesn't have a battery (It's just running off wall power) and that the CMOS/RTC battery is very likely dead. My friend had also suggested dead capacitors, but I have no way of testing that.
I tried to copy the setup files to the HDD and install from that, I tried booting with step-by-step confirmation (all activity stops after msmouse, no matter if I load it or not), I tried powering on the laptop without the floppy drive, without the CD-ROM drive and without both, I tried to start Windows from the command line (didn't experiment with switches though), I tried to swap the memory sticks around – none of that helped. I also tried to boot this recovery CD, but that just gets stuck on 'Starting Windows 95...'
So, I'm stumped. I don't know what the hell is wrong with this thing, how to resolve it or how to even diagnose it. For the record, I'm not very familiar with DOS-based Windows OS'es, in fact it's my first time trying to use one. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
P.S. I did install Windows XP Home Edition on it this morning just to make sure it can boot anything at all, and it was booting just fine.