Hard drive boot failure - Gateway2000 p4d-66

Hey folks,

I recently have taken an interest in restoring old computers and so far have had no major issues in any of my previous adventures. However....The last few weeks I have been working on an old Gateway 2000 P4D-66, it's an old 66Mhz 80486 circa 1994. My goal is to run DOS or a DOS variant (FreeDos) as the machine only has 32MB RAM.

I have the machine starting with no issues at all and it recognizes the HDD through the BIOS, it's a 10GB Maxtor. However the bios sees the disk as being only 8GB due to a bios limitation. I can successively install FreeDos & DOS without any hitches, however when I reboot the machine after installation I am presented with the following error:

"read error while reading drive"

To ensure that the bootloader was installed correctly I transplanted the disk into a second machine that I had lying around (An Intel P4, 512MB Ram) and the system boots perfectly (with both DOS or FreeDos installed). My original thoughts on the issue were that it may be to do with the BIOS HDD size limitation so I created a 2GB partition and left the rest of the disk raw and installed both DOS and then later FreeDos only to have the same error presented when trying to boot both times.

I noticed around the forums a few people mentioning the Gateway 2000 P4D-66 so here is hoping that someone can help me. It's a really nice machine and I'd love nothing more than to have it humming away running DOS, so any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If anyone requires more detailed information about the system or setup that might help them help me diagnose the problem please do ask and I'll post it here.

Thanks for reading folks, here's hoping someone can help.

Keva

Hey folks,

I still have not found a solution to this problem despite spending over 10 hours working at it. In order to move on with the rest of the restoration I have devised a viable "Work-Around" that will allow me to get the drive mounted and booted independently of the BIOS. I am using a boot manager installed on a floppy to mount and boot the drive. The boot manager I'm using is Small Boot Manager, it can be found on some old Ubuntu CDs. I mounted a Ubuntu 6.04 CD and found sbm.bin in the /install directory of the CD, I copied it to my desktop and then used dd to write the image to a floppy ( dd if=sbm.bin of=/dev/floppy ). I was then successfully able to boot the floppy and from there select the hard drive that I wanted to boot. Small Boot Manager also allows CDs/DVDs to be booted from even when the BIOS does not support booting from optical media, so it's a good floppy disk to have in your toolbox.

I'm going to leave this thread open in the hope that I can find a better solution. When I reach the end of the restoration project and if I have not found a better solution I will mark the thread as solved and accept the boot floppy as being a reasonable solution. Hope somebody finds this somewhat helpful if they are faced with a similar issue in the future.

Cheers,

Keva

Try a small drive, much smaller. 1994 is the year the 528MB barrier became a major player. So, if you try something smaller than that you might find out that your BIOS can't handle anything over 528MB without a DDO.

You can try the Maxblast software that came with those drives.
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/maxblast-master-dl/

You may have the remains of some form of disk overlay software clogging up your drive.

Ditto; try a smaller hard drive, as in 2.1gb or less. (Similar size of Gateway 2000 hard drives then, too. )

You'll probably be able to currently access the hard drive via a DOS prompt, but be unable to boot from it. Once a smaller hard drive is used, you'll have more success booting from it.

Thanks for the replies folks, I appreciate it.

I should have mentioned some of the drives that I was using. The machine came with a 1.08GB WD Caviar 21000 but there was no OS on the disk. It was however recognized by the BIOS and I noted down all the settings before removing the drive so as I could re-install it exactly the way it had been. I removed the drive and zero-ed the disk using dd in Linux ( dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb ) so this would have removed any DDO that might have been on there. So when I had installed the OS then on the disk and was getting the error mentioned earlier I decided to try a different disk, a Maxtor 9.25GB. The Maxtor was recognized by the BIOS as 8GB, but I think the limit that my BIOS has is 3.05GB (according to http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB305-c.html). Using the Maxtor I experienced the same error described above so I went back to using the original 1.08GB WD Caviar 21000.

Some interesting ideas about the 528Mb barrier. I was naive in thinking that if the BIOS could recognize the disk that it shouldn't have any issues in booting from it without the need for a DDO, so this is why I never tested it with a DDO. I don't have disk that is < 528MB so I can't do any definitive testing on the issue as yet. I'll pick one up on ebay and see I get on. In the meantime I'll try using a DDO on the 1.08Gb disk and see if I have any success. Thanks for the input guys, really appreciate it. I'll keep you all posted on my progress.

Cheers,

Keva

As suggested by GottaLottaStuff you should be able to install a DDO using the MaxBlast software or you can try setting the user parameters H/C/S for the Maxtor drive to something that is less than the limit of your system BIOS. With the second option you'll reduce the capacity of the drive though. If you have not done so you may want to create a primary partition for DOS of less than 528MB as well.