If it really is a 2x Panasonic drive, then the driver on those boot disks can't work, because they are for IDE cd-roms, which the Panasonic isn't.

Can you please post a picture of the cd-rom drive?

I'm pretty sure it's one of those. So I should be able to use it normally if I swapped it to a normal ide cd drive?
(I can open it up and take a photo of the stickers if you really want that)

The front of the drive isn't that interesting. 😉 Looks like a Matsushita CR-563, but can't really tell without seeing the label.

If you have an IDE cd-rom drive lying around, you could just replace it. Just make sure you connect it to IDE then.

It's possible that the system just doesn't like CD drives. I suspect that I would have to use a drive controller card to use a CDROM drive in my HP Vectra 486, as connecting it to the PATA connector on the system's riser card gets no response. The HP Bios has nothing for the detection of anything but a single hard disk drive. Even ignoring all of that and setting up CDROM drivers in DOS does nothing, as nothing find the drives.

Mister Xiado wrote:

It's possible that the system just doesn't like CD drives.

That system came with a cd drive! It's even the original one... He just can't use an ATAPI driver for it, since it's not connected to IDE.

Besides, it's completely moot if a cd drive is detected by the BIOS. This became standard when the feature to boot from cd was introduced. Up to that time, a cd drive was never detected by the BIOS. It doesn't have to, as it's not accessed through 80h anyway.

Hi, could you post pictures of the whole computer please (front and rear) ?

Here's a bunch of photos of the thing and it's drives. and yeah it seems to be a matsu. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Pr_ij … LbT?usp=sharing
I tried installing a normal ide drive to it but that just made it lose connection to the hdd and I can't get it to show up anymore. even with the original cd drive 😜

See the "CR-5xx" header on the sound card? That's where the CD drive should be connected, it's not IDE but rather a proprietary interface, first CD drives didn't have a standardized interface (to each manufacturer their own) except some which used ATA or SCSI.

Alrighty I connected the cdrom to the CR-5xx and the cd drive isn't responding in any way. The HDD doesn't want to show up anymore. (pc freezes if I autocheck it in the bios) and it doesn't want to boot from a floppy anymore (just shows "operating system not found" on bootup 😀

Edit: should I keep the cdrom jumper at slave or put it on something else?.
I can always order a "new" hdd if it happened to die.

That is strange indeed... Try setting the CD drive to Master (or "Single Drive" if it has such an option) when it's connected to the sound card, the hard drive not being suddenly recognized might be that it died (unless if you have an other machine to test it).

The drive has Cable select/Slave/Master. Master didn't change anything.
The floppy LED is lit but it doesn't want to read it. (does it not read it if the hdd is dead?)
and yeah hdd probably died.

I do own other IDE HDDs but isn't there a tight size limit on 486 machines? They are 80-200 gigs lmao.

No I meant testing the PB's hard drive on another machine to see if it works.

Anyways, the floppy being lit all the time could be either that you plugged the cable backwards (early 34-pin floppy drive cables weren't keyed, I learned it the hard way...), but if it's just lit when you try reading a disk, it could be that the heads are dirty. If that still don't work, either the drive died or the motherboard's on-board floppy controller died (worst case scnario: the motherboard is faulty).

As for the BIOS limitation, well yes, you'll hit several, I don't recall them on top of my head but on 486 machines, anything above 1GB might cause issues (IIRC).

Probably unrelated but I recall that some Packard Bell machines had a "Dallas" chip on them, that chip held the BIOS settings and had a battery in it, once the battery died, the BIOS would always roll back to default parameters. I remember that it could cause many issues (e.g. Missing hard drive parameters, wrong default floppy type...)

I have a usb hard drive reader somewhere, I'll try to find it tomorrow.
and this pc has a button cell battery on the mobo, no clock chip. (but it totally is dead. it did allow me to change the values from the bios though but it just cannot find the hdd anymore)

The floppy cable is in the right way. It's in the same way it was when it worked.

Thanks for the pics. Just out of curiosity : do you have the first 2 digits of the S/N (not the P/N which begins by 21) ?

pbuser wrote:

Thanks for the pics. Just out of curiosity : do you have the first 2 digits of the S/N (not the P/N which begins by 21) ?

22

A little bit early. FYI : a recovery CD was supplied with Packard Bells having their S/N starting by 23.
The best way to know : do you have an FN code near the S/N (5 alpha characters ending in the letter "S") ?

pbuser wrote:

A little bit early. FYI : a recovery CD was supplied with Packard Bells having their S/N starting by 23.
The best way to know : do you have an FN code near the S/N (5 alpha-numeric characters ending in the letter "S") ?

nope 😜

Thanks for this info.

Hmm try changing the battery first, after that change the floppy drive settings to the correct one (in your case I assume it would be "1.44M 3½-inch"), if after that the FDD starts again reading, then we can move onto the hard drive.