1994 GATEWAY p5-60 first generation Pentium
As you know I got the CD ROM driver form samsung by calling the tech support. the man was nice enough o email them to me, since this Samsung sc140 model of 1997 is no longer made. he said I would be able to install it from dos, but it did not work. so I went into file manager of win 311 and that worked. I tried many combinations a the dos prompt, the prompt even gave me a suggestions, and when I followed it I still got an error message. so then I put the win 95 boot disk in and it starting scrolling through whatever it looks up and it culminated with no device found. What I had to do was to change the place on the mother board where the CD ROM and hard drive connected. then it worked. SO I then deleted win 311 and dos, I did an unconditional format cause I wanted a pure installation of win 95 or win 98.
So I put both the boot disk and CD ROM disks in the drive, an the boot did the normal scanning, and this time, cause I had the ribbon in the right place, the CD ROM kicked in as it should have. Guess only the hard drive can work no matter where it is plugged in. Carolyn--the CD ROM you gave me , I could not put the small cord form the ROM to the sound card, all 4 attachments of the blue cord that came with the machine, would not fit, also the floppy was going, many times it would not read the disk :(. I shall use the CD ROM on my 486 with general NEC drivers then.
So windows starting booting, I got through putting the code numbers in, and planning which programs I want to install and which I did not want to install. So here we are moving merrily along and it locks up at 23% in copying files. Now it might not have let me copy cause this drive had 180,000 bytes in bad sectors which might have been needed for the software to run. So I tried again, this time it told me I did not have enough disk space to load win 95. So I put in an old boot disk I have that someone gave me and I knew not what was on it. Got to the c drive, it would not let me do an unconditional format ( which it was right from the get go always giving me problems). So I tried a format /q which usually worked, and from there I would do the unconditional format. This time no type for format would work, perhaps cause there really was no DOS installed at this point. So I merely did a deletion of all files. So much for that second run. Now I was ready for the third attempt at a clean installation, but this time I put all the cords back onto the original CD ROM instead of the one I was going to replace it with. If you recall when I got the machine, I was told the CD ROM was not functioning , even though it did have power going to it. Also I did not take out the old CD ROM yet because that was a hassle, since the metal box that covers it, had the power cords screwed through it, and I was afraid I would never be able to get the on/off button back on so I figured I would wait till the end once I could get the computer up and running. SO for my third attempt I put in the boot disk and CD ROM, and to may amazement it started loading, so the original CD ROM works! However, it locked up at 8% this time. At this point I was still remarkably calm. I decided to take an extra hard drive that I had which I had not yet cleaned off , it had win 98 on it, and see if the machine had the ability to read it. I figured a simple plugging it and booting the machine up is all that would be needed.
HECK NO--life isn't that simple. At this point I put in another floppy to replace the fickle one that was there, and I grabbed the hard drive and found some ram, also saw an old 1989 5 1/4 that you gave me Matt--it looked so funny, there was no protective casing around it at all as my other 5 1/4 has. All the circuitry was in plain sight on your Toshiba 380xt. OK I digress, I plugged in the hard drive, rebooted, however I was asked to insert a boot disk. The hard drive was not being detected, and I got this error message INVALID DRIVE SPECIFICATIONS. I can boot to the floppy but when I tried to switch to the hard drive I got that error message. I even tried installing DOS and win 95 and both times I got the error message saying no hard drive detected. I even hit F1 to get into the setup and put the numbers in manually, with no better luck. so I put it back to the automatic detect--default settings--HELP. I thought at least plugging in another hard drive would have been easier. Here are the specs for the old and new hard drives.
Both are western digital
old new
caviar 2540 caviar 33100
16 heads 16 heads
63spt 63spt
540.8mb 3166.7 mb
10848 cyl 6136 cyl
Help --western digital said there may be some software to download but doesn' know if it would work on such an old hard drive ---the newer pone I put in was 1997 versus the older one of 1994.
While I was there and all the bits and pieces were hanging out, remember I said the 2 strips of ram were under the floppy and hard drive case. Well just for the hell of it , I decided to put in the 2 strips I had gotten form you VIC, for the dell that time. Even thought it looked different, it snapped in well. The ram with the computer had the black boxes going evenly across it, the ones I added had a gap in the ,middle where there were just metal lines and even number on both sides of the space. Well that worked!!!! much to my amazement. As I booted the number of kb you see scrolling changed form 8132 to 16384. How did something like that work, if the chips were no the same as the original?? If I can just get the extra hard drive in and functioning I will be set, other wise I shall keep the old hard drive even though it has bad sectors and restore win 311 and dos to it.
I value any ideas
Sue Rose
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