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Gateway 2000 Hard drive woes

Looking at this thread for the first time, a couple months later, and having gone through the trails of getting a CF card to replace laptop hard drives where I ran into the problem that most CF cards have a master boot record that informs the computer that the device is a removable disk and therefore not a boot device. Its possible the Compaq needs to see a boot drive and freezes with the CF card in it's adapter. If you have a USB to CF adapter, try running RUFUS (free D/L) and install DOS or FreeDOS to the CF card and then try it in your Compaq. Rufus also will change the MBR to fixed disk so DOS will boot when you load DOS. Fixes the removable disk issue for you. Once the MBR is changed you can do whatever formatting you what to do if you need to modify the CF disk settings.
 
I will put your suggestions on my list of things to try, however it’s not even posting so I think the hang is occurring before the bios ever even examines the drive. I’ve made a video to try and illustrate the issue which I’ll post here later this evening.
 
True, my problem was the drive was detected in BIOS and reported the ocrrect size, but would not boot even after installing DOS 6.22 on the cards.

I ran into real problems with mSATA to 2.5" IDE adapters. The first type I tried was a PC board with the IDE at a 90 deg to the male 40 pin IDE. With or without a mSATA SSd installed it prevented the laptop from even powering up. I tried two of them and they both did the same thing. However, the mSATA adapters that fit into a plastic case the size of a 2.5" HDD does work. (for me). So many fun and games trying to bring back retro stuff.
 
Ok I’m ready to give up on this. Any recommendations for an xtide ISA card? It seems there are lots of choices out there.
 
Just realized I never followed up on this. So I got the XT-IDE card and it works wonderfully with my DOM. I've been happily booting to that for the last year. Has the side effect of leaving the IDE connector open for a CD drive :) Thanks a lot for all the inputs.
 
thenzero said:
Just realized I never followed up on this. So I got the XT-IDE card and it works wonderfully with my DOM. I've been happily booting to that for the last year. Has the side effect of leaving the IDE connector open for a CD drive :) Thanks a lot for all the inputs.
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Glad to see a happy ending to the story 😁

Just for the record (and sorry I’m late to the party), I had the same problem with my Gateway 4DX-33 Slimline system. The way I fixed it was by installing DOS on the CF card with the CF adapter in another machine, and then I installed the adapter in the Gateway. It seems like you already had tried that though, so maybe it was just the adapter.

Either way, hope you are loving the Gateway! They are my favorite systems! 😀
If @thenzero or anybody else ever needs some documentation or drivers, let me know! I’d be happy to help!
 
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