Restoring a Gateway 2000 4DX2-50 80486 Desktop (Warning: Lots of images)

[sgifanatic]

Part I

I've always liked Gateway 2000 systems from the '90s, but have never owned one. Recently, I acquired a slim, 4DX2-50 486 desktop model. When I opened the box and laid eyes on the thing, I physically took a step back. It was revolting. One of the filthiest systems I have ever seen. I don't know where the previous owner stored this thing.

The first thing I did was to use lysol wipes all over... a half a dozen wipes later, the top layers of dirt had come off, and whatever ebola strain this thing carried had hopefully been neutralized.

Then, I moved the system to the garage and waited until the weekend arrived. This morning, I was able to find an hour or so to work on it; a benefit of waking up extra early! The first pics you see below are actually post-lysol cleaning. This was significantly dirtier out of the box.

1) The plastics were yellowed, stickers all over, grime, filth of all variety on the metal chassis.







2) The insides were even more repulsive. The pictures don't do it justice, but you can probably see the dust and filth mixed with moisture to yield this disgusting sticky, black residue all over.

 

[sgifanatic]

Part II


2) Continued...



3) Turns out, this is a system from 1995... I still think of 486s as "modern", but it's been more than 20 years! I suppose the cool stuff you experience as a teen never stops being cool



4) Got the blower out and gave the insides a good high-pressure air bath

 

[Unknown_K]

I have one of those (dead), yours working? I recapped mine but there is something else wrong with it.

 

[sgifanatic]

Part III

5) And wiped down the insides...



6) A major effort was Retr0briting the front panel. This was my first-ever attempt at using Retr0brite. Not perfect, but I think it went reasonably well.







7) A problem that still remained even after the retr0brite application was some dirt that had gotten deep into the plastic texture, and of course, the still-quite-filthy metal chassis cover. This was handled with crud cutter, a spray that's like goo gone and helps remove stickers, glue, graffiti and all manner of nonsense. Once this was done, I was relatively satisfied with how the system looked. "After" pictures in the next installment.

 

[sgifanatic]

Part IV

8) Voila! It finally looks decent!











Nice "after" pictures, wouldn't you say? I've hit the five image limit again, so more in the next installment.

 

[gronos]

That's a nice little box. Probably pretty pricey back in 1995. A tape drive, while not rare, wasn't exactly standard equipment back then. I think I had a QIC-250 one one of my boxes.

What all has it got in it? Anything neat/special, or just standard stuff?

 

[sgifanatic]

Part V

9) Ok, so it looks good. But does it work? Well. Sort of. When I started it up initially, it powered up and gave me a BIOS POST screen. The hard drive was spinning, but I got a "Fixed disk error" on the BIOS and couldn't actually get the system to boot. Here's the BIOS POST screen:



12 Megs of RAM and a 290MB HDD... which doesn't work. There's a CD in here too, as well as a floppy and a tape drive. The CD, I found out, was disconnected from the IDE controller. There's a single IDE port on the motherboard and the cable that ties that into the HDD has a single head. Nothing to loop around to the CD.

So much for the hard disk. The only IDE hard drives I had lying around were 30+GB specimens. I tried to install this one:



I entered the BIOS and tried the auto detect option on the IDE config screen. The system didn't respond for a while and I couldn't even get the NUM LOCK light to turn on, so I figured it halted. I restarted the system, but it wouldn't come back up. The PSU fan, I noticed, was not spinning. I am not sure if it was spinning earlier, but certainly was not working any longer. Despite this, the CD-ROM, which had its power cable connected (no IDE), lit up, as did the power LED on the front panel. Weird.

I tried a number of things, but nothing worked, so I gave up and came inside for dinner.

A little while later, I found a few extra minutes and, in any case, that nagging "incomplete project" feeling got the better of me. Back in the garage.

I fiddled around some more and lo-and-behold, the system powers up again. No PSU fan spinning, but everything else lit up.

I tried the new HDD once more, manually entering the cylinders, sectors and other information. As soon as I hit ESC to save the changes, the system halted again. At that same darn IDE settings BIOS page.

I suspected that the mid 90s BIOS simply couldn't handle such a large (40 GB) IDE HDD. I removed the HDD and rebooted. I got the POST screen back....

And that's where I'm at. I have a IDE-2-CF card lying around somewhere. I will probably just use that with a 1GB CF card and try my luck. If that doesn't work, then it's back to trying to find an old, small IDE HDD. I also need to find the right IDE cable with a long enough length and a considerable distance between the two IDE device connectors. The CD-ROM is several inches apart from the HDD.

The PSU fan not spinning up has me worried. As does the incident where the system wouldn't POST. Am I dealing with hardware that's about to bid adieu? I don't know. For now, I am pleased I got this system and that it is looking good cosmetically. It also does have some nice extras, like the tape drive and an internal network card. My next step is to solve the drive issue.

Any thoughts you all have will be very welcome!

 

[sgifanatic]

I have one of those (dead), yours working? I recapped mine but there is something else wrong with it.

Sorry to hear it. I just sent a Mac Color Classic mobo to a tech in a different state for a recapping job. I thought that was what was wrong. After incurring the expense, found out there was something else. Now the board is in limbo, having been posted to yet another tech, and my Mac is motherboard-less.

Re the Gateway, it does POST, but if you read through all the parts I've posted thus far, it has a bad HDD and doesn't boot to an OS.

 

[Rick Ethridge]

What you have is not uncommon for a system of this vintage. To use a larger drive you'll need a PCI secondary drive controller. Shutting off the primary controller is an option but usually unnecessary. This is what I've done with Socket 5 and 7 boards.

 

[sgifanatic]

What you have is not uncommon for a system of this vintage. To use a larger drive you'll need a PCI secondary drive controller. Shutting off the primary controller is an option but usually unnecessary. This is what I've done with Socket 5 and 7 boards.

Thank you. There is one PCI slot available. I wonder if there is a SATA controller option. That would allow me to use more convenient cables, current drives and a more modern CD.

 

[Caluser2000]

There's a few different ways to install a larger hdd and they've been discussed quite a few times on this forum-> Nic with eprom containing XTIDE Bios extension, dynamic drive overlay software etc.

 

[PeterNC]

The CD-ROM looks like a Sony CDU-33A. It needs a Sony controller and 34PIN FDD cable to connect. Some sound cards have those Sony controllers on board. Smaller IDE HDDs are pretty common and cheap on www.ebay.com but also at www.elecshopper.com. Nice system otherwise. You can also find a PSU on eBay probably: Gateway 2000 desktops were very common once upon a time.

 

[Billyray]

Might take a look here.

 

[sgifanatic]

The CD-ROM looks like a Sony CDU-33A. It needs a Sony controller and 34PIN FDD cable to connect. Some sound cards have those Sony controllers on board. Smaller IDE HDDs are pretty common and cheap on www.ebay.com but also at www.elecshopper.com. Nice system otherwise. You can also find a PSU on eBay probably: Gateway 2000 desktops were very common once upon a time.

You are absolutely correct. I discovered this last night when I tried to connect the IDE cable to the CD-ROM. Looks like the previous owner removed the sound card/CD controller. Cable is also missing.

The plan at this stage is:

1) upgrade to 96mb RAM (max supported, I believe)
2) find a backup psu; this one seems unstable
3) get a sound blaster w Sony interface
4) get a 800mb-1.2gb ide HDD. I believe this BIOS supports a max of 1.2gb.
5) alternative to #4, get a compatible IDE controller and larger hard disk. XTIDE was presented as an option in an earlier post, and reading up on it, it sounds great! However, I can't find any pre-assembled versions to purchase

 

[Stone]

...I believe this BIOS supports a max of 1.2gb....

Why do you say that? I am not aware of any 1.2 GB size barrier/limitation.

 

[Malc]

5) alternative to #4, get a compatible IDE controller and larger hard disk. XTIDE was presented as an option in an earlier post, and reading up on it, it sounds great! However, I can't find any pre-assembled versions to purchase

I'm not familiar with the nic card that you have in there but if that is an empty boot rom socket i can see and you have the gear to burn eproms the XT-IDE Bios is a good route to go.

 

[RWallmow]

Why do you say that? I am not aware of any 1.2 GB size barrier/limitation.

Stone is correct, There were no 1.2GB limits. Being a 486 I would assume it will suffer from either 528MB or 2.1GB limits. I would stick a XT-IDE BIOS in a ROM socket (usually NIC Boot ROM socket, since everyone should have a NIC these days anyways). Though if you have a PCI slot which I saw mention of, you can probably get a ATA133 or SATA150 card (any faster would be a complete waste), but be sure to get one that has a BIOS on it, I've seen some cheapies that do not have a BIOS and thus are NOT bootable, but that is by far the minority of cards, just something to watch for.

Common BIOS limits (list culled from http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html)

The 528 MB limit
The 2.1 GB limit
The 3.2 GB limit (Bug in Phoenix 4.03 and 4.04 BIOS's only, not a common limit)
The 4.2 GB limit
The 7.9 GB limit
The 8.4 GB limit
The 33.8 GB limit
The 137 GB limit
The 2 TiB limit

 

[k2x4b524[]

why not just find a good ide dvd-rom or burner, those are happy in almost anything with an IDE controller, use the windows 98 boot disk oak cd-driver, that works with just about anything pata.

 

[Krille]

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It looks like the ZIF-socket lever isn't properly locked in position?

It seems to me that the first and easiest step is to verify that the original harddrive really is broken. Try it in another computer. Second thing I'd do is to take the computer apart completely and clean everything (including the insides of the PSU and floppy drive etc) until it's like new. Dirt can cause a lot of strange errors and that machine seems to have gotten more than its fair share of filth.

 

[sgifanatic]

Why do you say that? I am not aware of any 1.2 GB size barrier/limitation.

I can't seem to find the dang article now, but just like the one I've pasted below for the 4DX2-50V, there was a PC Magazine (or some similar mag) comparison table I looked up. The largest supported drive for the 4DX2-50 was listed at 1.2GB. As you will see in this V model comparison, other 486s supported larger than 1GB drives, so I figured the 1.2GB cap was probably not because larger HDDs were unavailable.

On second thought, it may not have been a BIOS limitation, but instead just the largest drive Gateway 2000 carried at the time as a factory installed option... anyway, that's where I came up with the 1.2GB number from.