At 12:42 AM 3/17/1998 Nancy Wockner wrote:
>
>I own a 5-year old 486 Gateway 2000 desktop PC with 2 floppy drives, 170
>megs using Win 3.1.  I would like to replace the bootable 5.25"
>floppy(drive A:) with a cd-rom drive.    Now the problem is there is no
>way to boot except from drive C.  How can drive B: be made to boot?
>
>Is it possible to boot from an external Zip drive?


Nancy:

Just make the B: drive the A: drive.

Go ahead and replace the 5.25" floppy with a cd-rom drive. I
recommend you get an IDE cd-rom drive and make it the
slave to your 170 MB hard drive (think about replacing this,
too). If you have a Western Digital hard drive, you need to
set the drive select jumper (in the back by the power socket)
to MASTER (pins 6-5).

Then, plug the floppy data ribbon cable so that the remaining
floppy drive (the 1.44 MB floppy drive, I presume) is plugged
in AFTER the twist in the ribbon. This will make the remaining
floppy drive the boot floppy (changing it from the B: drive to the
A: drive).

Then you need to go into CMOS setup and change the
floppy drive parameters so that the A: drive matches the
type you have (a 1.44 MB floppy, I presume) and you delete
the B: drive ("none" setting). You go into CMOS with a
Phoenix BIOS Gateway by pressing, at the DOS prompt:

        <Ctrl> <Alt> <Esc>

If that doesn't work, you have an older Gateway 486. Press:

        <Ctrl> <Alt> <S>

Regarding Zip drives, you can only boot from a Zip drive,
if at all, only if it is an IDE or SCSI Zip drive and you have
hardware support (i.e.: motherboard and/or expansion card
BIOS) and operating system support. I have an external Zip
drive that isn't able to boot.

I hope that helps.

John Chin