Rehabing 486 - "HELP!"

[Brangwen]

Colleagues:

I'm working on 486 Packard Bell... Stop laughing! It has 3.1 running on it. My goal is to partition off the 3.1 and otherwise used section of the HD, partition magic it, and install Win95 on a new bootable partition.

I attempted to partition, but was prompted that there were some lost clusters which had to be removed before I could proceed. I do not know of a defrag or scan component in 3.1. Does anyone have an idea of how to get around that?

Then I must get the CDROM loaded. Presently it's driver (apparently) is not available and I will have to get that going before loading Win95 from a CD...

Any ideas regarding this project would be GREATLY appreciated!

PS: The Phoenix Bios does not mention a CDROM, just "A" drive, "B" drive, and a couple HD listings. My guess is the second HD listing must be for a CDROM...?

Thanks again. This info is for a couple good causes: a friend who needs an e-mail computer, and I need help for my mental stability! Thx!

Brangwen http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

[Richard_Cranium72]

I hope you have better luck with the 486 than I did.

On the partition, I don't have a clue.
Why do it ?

On the CD-ROM drivers, grab ur 98 bootie disc and get MSCDEX off it.
One pewter I worked on saw the CD as another HD.

Another prob you may encounter , is the absence of a PCI bus.
This is a real pain, if yours has PCI slots that is one prob you won't have to deal with.

Losa Luck
DrVette

[By-tor & the Snow Dog]

Hi. As far as the CD-ROM goes, I have a floppy with CD drivers on it, I'd be more than happy to e-mail the files to you if you like, just let me know.

As far as fragmenting, Norton Utilities was around back then, though I don't have a copy of one that old. I do have Norton system works 2001, but obviously that won't work. I'm sure there's someone out there who still has their floppies from an old version.

Good luck my friend.

By-Tor

[mike511]

scandisk was still around back then in good old dos. You might want to try that. Or make a dos boot disk, if possible, if not grtab a win95, or win98 boot disk. Put on it format.com, fdisk.com, autoexec.bat, config.sys, mscdex.com, and i have a generic cd-rom driver that i could email you that has recognizes any cd-rom drive in dos, windows, etc. THen make sure your config.sys and autoexec.bat contain the right commands. Boot to the disk to make sure it works. Then just re-format the drive if you don't care about the stuff on it. Then you can just load win95 on it straight from the cd-rom. I've done it many times on old 486's dx2's at 66mhz. No pci bus's on them either, all ISA. And i've had no problems. They run fine. Even installed office 97 on them and it ran pretty well. Just make sure you have atleast 16 megs of ram or more on it for some decent speed. If you want a copy of my dos-boot disk i have, i could send it to you.

It might sound hard, but its easier than it sounds.

Mike

[jl123]

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/8774/

Just in case you need this it's here. This is just a good site to bookmark. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

~Joel

[This message has been edited by jl123 (edited 01-02-2001).]

[socalgal]

Moved to ===> Tech Support.