I just bought a Packard Bell Legend 20CD with a 486DX2 and 20mb RAM, and it loads windows 3.11 just fine with the original included hard drive. It wouldn't boot at first, and then I found that I HAD to replace the CMOS battery for any hard drive configuration to save, but that's a whole different story. However, now I want to install a windows 95/NT dual boot on a different drive and I don't want to change the original hard drive since it has all the original Packard Bell software. The problem is, I've been pulling my hair out because I cannot for the life of me install windows 95 on any other hard drives! I've been trying to install from the hard drive as well since it has no CD-ROM drive, and this worked fine in other computers/virtual machines. Here are the hard drives I've tried:
In addition, I made sure all the jumper settings were set to "master" on all the drives. The windows 95 install files were fine installing on a virtual machine. I can't format from the Packard Bell since the windows 98 bootdisk has no format command and my MS-DOS disks are corrupted. I've had similar issues on other 486 and Pentium machines but all were fixed with fdisk /mbr, replacing the hard drive, or changing BIOS settings. All of these drives I tried were working pulls, so much that I cannabalized a few other working semi-vintage computers. I really hope that someone here knows even more than me, because I spent 10 hours straight and didn't get anywhere. I really don't want to replace the original Packard Bell software since it'll be lost forever and may sell for a lot in the future, and besides, the original hard drive doesn't even detect in windows 10.
I also don't want to stick with the original for my purposes because I have a lot of windows 95 games I want to run. For now, I'm gonna be keeping an eye out for any other good deals on 486 computers. Thanks in advance
- 428mb: This is the original and it boots straight to windows 3.11 without problems, but there's tons of original software like the graphics driver and Packard Bell Navigator so I want to preserve these. Also, when I plug it into my windows 10 computer, it shows as 0.0gb in both disk management and Minitool and I can't see or create any partitions.
- 545mb: This hard drive autodetects correctly in BIOS, but just acts weird all around both on the Packard Bell and my windows 10 PC. I can't format it using windows 10 disk management, and the Minitool partition wizard takes forever to format it to FAT16. Then I can transfer files to it fine from my windows 10 PC, but it gets completely corrupted when I try to access it from the windows 98 bootdisk on the Packard Bell. It gives different errors every time I try to access it from the bootdisk prompt, along the lines of "invalid storage media" or "bad sector" or "bad file allocation table". Whenever I plug it back into my windows 10 PC, all the files have garbled names with weird symbols, and are undeletable. I just have to delete/repartition/reformat, but then the same thing happens. Since this drive acted so weird on both the Packard Bell and on windows 10, I assumed it was a loss and moved on.
- 4gb: This hard drive autodetects as a 17mb drive. When I FDISK it, it shows that there's a 2GB partition which takes up 100% of the space. What's really weird is that it only lets me create another 92mb partition, and says that this one takes up 28% of the space. That means that both partitions take up 128% of the drive, yet they're far less than the drive's 4gb, so this doesn't make any sense. Nonetheless, I've successfully installed DOS 5 and Windows 3.11 onto this drive. But when I try to install windows 95, it forces me to run scandisk, and says that every cluster in the last three-quarters or so of the drive is bad. It won't let me continue from there, but then I tried setup with the /is option to disable Scandisk. It let me run through the whole setup fine, taking half an hour or so to copy all the files. But then when setup restarts the computer, it gives me a black screen of death with a blinking cursor, which I can't even CTRL-ALT-DEL out of. I've gotten a black screen of death like this before on a different vintage computer, so I tried what worked that time. I typed FDISK /mbr in the prompt, but this time it didn't work. It still froze with the black screen blinking cursor when I restarted.
- 10gb: Much the same as the 4gb drive, except it autodetects in BIOS as 2116 mb, and I skipped past windows 3.11 and went directly to the windows 95 install. It installed fine, and didn't even give me any scandisk errors this time. But when setup restarted, same black screen of death. FDISK /mbr, restarted, same thing again.
- 40gb: This one froze the autodetect.
- 250mb: Also froze the autodetect.
In addition, I made sure all the jumper settings were set to "master" on all the drives. The windows 95 install files were fine installing on a virtual machine. I can't format from the Packard Bell since the windows 98 bootdisk has no format command and my MS-DOS disks are corrupted. I've had similar issues on other 486 and Pentium machines but all were fixed with fdisk /mbr, replacing the hard drive, or changing BIOS settings. All of these drives I tried were working pulls, so much that I cannabalized a few other working semi-vintage computers. I really hope that someone here knows even more than me, because I spent 10 hours straight and didn't get anywhere. I really don't want to replace the original Packard Bell software since it'll be lost forever and may sell for a lot in the future, and besides, the original hard drive doesn't even detect in windows 10.
I also don't want to stick with the original for my purposes because I have a lot of windows 95 games I want to run. For now, I'm gonna be keeping an eye out for any other good deals on 486 computers. Thanks in advance