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Gateway P5-60 scored and works, NT4, TALL tower

NathanAllan

Veteran Member
Joined
Jun 1, 2003
Messages
2,437
Location
Bellevue, Colorado
Hello again everybody,

I managed to score this tower a while back and got it fired up; nothi really wrong with it, just needed a few connections replugged and a new CMOS battery.

It has Windows NT 4 workstation and server installed, but it has a password and a buggy cd drive. I also don't have a floppy drive for it (none of mine seem to have held up) to make a boot floppy. It's really picky about what CD boots up, most linux distros won't boot. The stock CD drive was toast, so I'm using a CD-R drive that seems to work most times. Trying Ubuntu 9 now, it's isn't working.

Some of the specs are here:

P166 jumpered to 133, 131072KB memory, new mainboard from some point in time, has 20gb and 40gb drives.

I'd love to see it run fully in NT but can't crack the password, about to try the Ultimate Boot CD if it will see it.

Hope the links work, those are two older videos I made just showing it off.

http://youtu.be/Tb36a7dqfBA

http://youtu.be/Ab-J-wpFlkg

It looks like I might end up pulling a known good fdd from another machine and usign an NTFS boot floppy if I can get everything to work *IF the UBCD doesn't work.

One neat thing I tried (still trying, gotta troubleshoot) is getting an IDE-SD adapter, seeing if it will boot from that. So far no, but I have to make sure that thing works.
 
UBCD should do the trick. I've used it a number of times. But if the hardware is a bit flacky who knows. Generally just do a fresh install though after having a poke around. I seem to have accumulated a few OEM NT 4 workstation cds over the years. Certainly more than any other OS. Did you try just Administrator as the username and password? Some folk were lazy and left these as the defaults.
 
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Didn't know 3com Etherlink III cards were getting hard to find. Just let three of them go to the recyclers, if only I saw this video a week earlier..
 
Guess I made a mistake, they don't seem to be that hard to come by. I found several ISA Etherlink III cards for sale in different places, but they definitely are valuable even if they're common. Valuable in that they seem to work in anything that I can fit them in.

Also, tried Ultimate Boot CD and it didn't work :( It hung up on a black screen right after it detected the disk drive.

There is a Zip drive here, Does anybody know if they're bootable devices> Pretty sure they are, if I can figure it out I'll make that the boot drive in order to run either the UBCD or Ophcrack.
 
Old versions of ERD Commander will reset the password with its Locksmith function. You can boot off a Zip drive if the BIOS supports it, usually they have an entry for "ATAPI Removable Device" in the boot order list.
 
It's not just the BIOS that needs to support booting from a Zip drive and the P5 is early enough that the BIOS might not support it. The early IDE Zip drives would not boot even on systems that supported bootable removable media. Gateway shipped a lot of Zip drives that predate ATAPI.

It may be easier to remove the hard drives and controller; install them in a newer box; and rely on the newer box having a more modern BIOS to run CDs that reset the passwords.
 
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I'll give ERD Commander and also Winbuilder (found that while searching) a go. Right, the bios doesn't support the zip drive so that option is out. The CD sometimes sees a cd, it's hit or miss.

The drive is IDE so there is no seperate controller, and that's definitely the best next step I can think of after trying the programs listed above.

Stone, I might get that NT$ WS from you, if all of this doesn't work. Plus it's just neat to have just because :)

Later this afternoon, right now gotta run around. Great suggestions, thanks!!

Nathan
 
I'm kind of over thinking this. I have an 80GB hdd that I can drop in, from a computer I used to own that the mainboard died in it that has Windows XP on it. Hopefully I can drop it on, run it in safe mode as a host drive and then just yank the passwords from the drives in the 166. Not today, had a doc appt and it left me pretty drained. Off to work tomorrow.

/edit Better even yet, yank the drive from the 166 and read it as a secondary in a working machine that also runs NTFS. Krebizfan yours was the suggestion that sparked this thought. Definitely over thinking things.
 
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If you can't plug the password, use Hiren's boot cd, i've found it more reliable than UBCD, especially when it comes to laptops and network operating systems *NT 3.51, NT 4*, i would for that p-166 with a dvd drive, gives a little more flexibility for transferring large things, and the bios doesn't care, to it optical is optical...
 
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