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

[sgifanatic]

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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.

Good catch, and yes, you are right. There is something wrong with the socket. It doesn't lock in position.

I will certainly be opening the supply up to see what's up with the fan. This system will get another thorough cleaning along the lines you suggest. But that will probably have to wait a couple of weeks... unfortunately am working through the coming weekend

 

[sgifanatic]

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.

I did try an IDE DVD-ROM and replaced the HDD with it. Auto-detect does not pick it up... I will try to see if there's a disk geometry equiv for this drive I can find online to manually enter.

 

[sgifanatic]

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

Thanks, RWallmow! I hadn't seen this before, and found it quite useful.

 

[smeezekitty]

I did try an IDE DVD-ROM and replaced the HDD with it. Auto-detect does not pick it up... I will try to see if there's a disk geometry equiv for this drive I can find online to manually enter.

486 BIOSes do NOT support CDROMs. You need an OS level driver

 

[sgifanatic]

A little bit of progress to report.

I was able to get a Sandisk CF card (256MB) to work as the primary IDE disk. It had an old Windows Embedded image so it doesn't boot, but I get an NTLDR error message, so I know it's being recognized. No BIOS woes. The key was just to find the CF card disk geometry and manually enter it in.

I ordered:

1. A replacement/spare Gateway Astec power supply (145W)
2. Round IDE cables for the floppy (less messy)
3. Creative Sound Blaster CT 2230 with a Sony CDROM interface
4. 34 pin floppy cable to connect the CD-ROM with the SB CT2230
5. A single 32MB 72pin SIMM non parity

The items have not arrived yet. Will get here next week. I'll share more pics and updates as the project moves along.

 

[RWallmow]

Thanks, RWallmow! I hadn't seen this before, and found it quite useful.

No problemo.

A little bit of progress to report.

I was able to get a Sandisk CF card (256MB) to work as the primary IDE disk. It had an old Windows Embedded image so it doesn't boot, but I get an NTLDR error message, so I know it's being recognized. No BIOS woes. The key was just to find the CF card disk geometry and manually enter it in.

I ordered:

1. A replacement/spare Gateway Astec power supply (145W)
2. Round IDE cables for the floppy (less messy)
3. Creative Sound Blaster CT 2230 with a Sony CDROM interface
4. 34 pin floppy cable to connect the CD-ROM with the SB CT2230
5. A single 32MB 72pin SIMM non parity

The items have not arrived yet. Will get here next week. I'll share more pics and updates as the project moves along.

IDE cables wont work for the floppy, Floppy is a 34pin connector, not 40. Good cables to have on hand none the less, I need to order some myself, my big old box of IDE (and floppy for that matter) cables is dwindling down.

 

[Stone]

...Good cables to have on hand none the less, I need to order some myself, my big old box of IDE (and floppy for that matter) cables is dwindling down.

I've got some of each if you're interested in a few.

 

[sgifanatic]

No problemo.



IDE cables wont work for the floppy, Floppy is a 34pin connector, not 40. Good cables to have on hand none the less, I need to order some myself, my big old box of IDE (and floppy for that matter) cables is dwindling down.

Sorry. I ordered the right cable, but mistyped the "IDE" next to "floppy" in my post. I did order some round IDE cables for a future HDD, AND the right kind of floppy cables for the floppy drive.

 

[k2x4b524[]

Good deal you were able to source the parts to make it work, you should have a happy dx2-50 once you get the parts. Perhaps a cpu upgrade might be in order of it is supported?

 

[RWallmow]

I've got some of each if you're interested in a few.

I might take you up on that, I've bought some DSDD 5.25" disks from you in the past and been quite pleased. Now my stock of DSDD 3.5" is running low so I might have to hit you up (after payday) for some disks and cables :D

 

[RWallmow]

Good deal you were able to source the parts to make it work, you should have a happy dx2-50 once you get the parts. Perhaps a cpu upgrade might be in order of it is supported?

Yeah I vote CPU upgrade, I have an 83Mhz POD chip I could sell if your rig has the right socket and you're interested (box is unsealed, but its never been installed). I bought it before I knew the POD chips don't fit in the older 486 sockets, it needs a Socket 2 or 3 IIRC, and mine was Socket 1, I ended up with a 100mhz Cyrix instead (pun intended).

 

[njroadfan]

There is a good chance that Gateway released a BIO update for that machine. I recall working on a few that had that problem. I hate Phoenix BIOS with a passion, by far the worst, most out of date (for the time) BIOS core. Intel usually makes the motherboard in those LPX riser card machines. Baby AT style Gateways from 1995 usually had Micronics boards. If you are really lucky, there was a MR BIOS developed for that board that won't have silly drive detection bugs.

 

[sgifanatic]

Ok, so the saga continues. I received the Soundblaster 16 with Sony CDU support, the new 34-pin CD-ROM cable and a 32MB stick of RAM.

First, to remind you, I had gotten the system to recognize a 256MB Compact Flash drive as its IDE HDD. As the CF card previously had a Windows Embedded image for a different system, I would see an NTLDR error every time I tried to boot it. I wasn't too concerned as this meant that the drive was being recognized and was trying to boot.

Here's the CF card - nice thing about this setup is there's no IDE cable. It just plugs into the motherboard directly.



The first upgrade I performed was to install the 32MB SIMM. Interestingly, I seemed to have lucked out in that the SIMM I bought from eBay has a Gateway sticker on it! Gateway approved memory for my Gateway system. A nice coincidence. The stick was installed, like so:



But then I didn't want the other 4MB SIMMs to go to waste. This system has three SIMM slots, so I plugged in the additional 8MB as per the image below:



Did it work? Yes it did. 40MB installed!



Ok, so now let's move on to the CD-ROM installation. Since I'm running out of images, that's in the next post.

 

[sgifanatic]

Ok, so here's the sound card:



In this system, there are three slots on either side of the riser card. The slots on the right are fairly obstructed, particularly with the new CF card installation shown in the previous post. So, I chose to install the Sound Blaster 16 on the left (with the system facing me). The top slot was occupied by the LAN card, so I plugged it into the lower slot (mid slot is a PCI slot). However, the board was bending quite a bit because of the increased height of the new 32MB SIMM. Here's what it looked like:



So, I decided to remove both boards and swap positions.



Ah! much better. Also notice the new round sleeve 34-pin cable. I prefer these immensely over the bare ribbon!

Ok, so let's boot-up with a DOS boot disk:



This is when I ran into trouble. The story continues below...

 

[sgifanatic]

The system did boot up into DOS, but when I tried to format the CF disk...



everything went fine until I received a "Error writing FAT" message after 99% completion! What the heck is this?



Suffice to say, the various format options were tried and none worked. Same issue. I then used fdisk to delete all previous partitions, recreated a new DOS partition, rebooted the system, tried another format. Same result. Tried fdisk /mbr also. No luck.

Next, I removed the CF card, plugged it into a card reader on my regular "modern" PC and used Rufus to format it and write MS-DOS system files. Everything appeared to go fine on the new PC (Yes, I used FAT and not FAT-32), but it wouldn't boot on the Gateway.

When I booted off of floppy again and tried to change to C: drive, it gave me the Abort/Retry/Fail treatment as it does with unformatted volumes.

Tried to format it again, same problem.

So there you go. I am presently stuck unable to get this CF card to format and take the sys boot files.

While I will attempt to play with this further, I have, in the meantime, ordered a 5400RPM Quantum IDE drive with 1.2GB of capacity. This arrives on the 6th. In the event that all else fails, at least I will have some way to keep the project moving forward.

 

[sgifanatic]

A quick update on the Gateway rehab/upgrade project. More pictures will be forthcoming soon.

I received the Quantum IDE drive and BIOS auto detected it perfectly. I was able to boot from floppy and fdisk/format it. The system is now booting from the hard disk. I decided to just go the HDD route and not worry about the CF card for now.

Next step is to get some drivers (Sony CD-ROM, SB, LAN) transferred over so I can start installing software more conveniently via CD/network as opposed to floppies.

Slowly but surely, it's getting there!

 

[Rick Ethridge]

Good show!

 

[sgifanatic]

Good show!

Thanks, Rick. Though I got so darn frustrated with this today, I almost threw it out the window. The Sony CDU-33A is driving me insane...

I was too optimistic. I connected everything up, closed the case cover, set up the machine and thought software was my only remaining challenge. I was wrong. Here's what the system looked like when I started the software install:



The first thing I wanted to do was to get the CD-ROM drive configured. I have a CT2230 SB, so I obtained the SB16 drivers. The sbcd.sys driver was added to config.sys by the install program. As the image below shows, I had the card configured to 220 (address):



However, the drive wasn't found at driver load time. I tried all the addresses... and the slcd.sys driver too. Here's what my desperate config.sys looked like in the end:



And here are all the boot-time error messages:



Not sure what the heck is going on here. Next post shows some additional images in the hopes someone can either spot an issue or recommend things to try.

 

[sgifanatic]

Cable - red lined with pin 1.



The drive is powered up. It only shows the green light. Never goes orange ever through the entire power-up, driver load sequence.



Sony drive mode is selected...



On another note, I can't seem to find the ACCTON LAN card drivers for DOS. This one has an MPX 432A chip. Would anyone happen to know where I could get these?



As a temporary measure, I was able to get an IDE drive to work with the Oak CD-ROM driver, but I really want the CDU-33A functional. My other drive has a black faceplate... and I got the SB with a Sony interface solely so that it would drive the CD-ROM.

I'm stuck again with both the CD-ROM issue, as well as no LAN drivers.

I'll probably have to burn a CD with all the software I want to install on this system. However, many of the apps I want to install are distributed as .IMA floppy image files. I am wondering if there are easier ways to get the SW transferred over, or if there is a DOS utility that can mount the .IMA as a virtual drive... anything to speed-up the WfW 3.11/DOS 6.22 transfer/setup... advice would be welcome!

 

[PeterNC]

Did you set the jumper on the CT2230 to Sony for the CD-ROM controller? Did you use the Sony CD-ROM drivers?

I have my CDU-33A working just fine but I decided to buy a dedicated OEM Sony controller card for it.