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First post, by Shadzilla

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This is a long shot but does anyone have, or know where to locate, the Gateway System Restoration CD and Gateway Operating System Backup CD for a G6-400, built November 1998? I'm trying to restore the system to its original shipping condition as best as possible.

There are a variety of the former on archive.org and the restoration CD images from 7.7 appear to have the right drivers for the system, and that is the version I've tested so far. Unfortunately the only operating system image for Windows 98 I've found is from April 2000 and is Windows 98 SE. So far I've been able to use the restoration CD to prep the drive and start the Windows installation, and this does complete with the SE operating system CD albeit with a few problems.

First issue is the CD drive is not installed properly and MSCDEX errors out. It appears to be missing from config.sys, so despite selecting the generic IDE CD-ROM option during restoration, that's not quite working (I'm trying to source a correct replacement Toshiba DVD drive the system shipped with that might iron this one out).

Then once the OS is installed and booted, it hasn't actually installed drivers for sound or video (which it detected during initial restoration).

But I can't diagnose this yet because when I right click My Computer, select Properties - nothing happens! Never seen that one before.

Finally, it's installed the US locale and didn't ask if I might enjoy UK instead. That one is probably more solvable although initially there didn't seem to be a £ symbol available. That's why having the original UK discs would be a bonus.

Thoughts and tips welcome!

Reply 1 of 4, by chinny22

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I still have my GP6 400 including the restore CD.
It's from 1999 though and think it's Win98SE I can check version number and upload when home if you don't get any better offers

Reply 2 of 4, by Shadzilla

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That could be really useful, please and thank you! I believe it should be two CDs, one to prep the system and another disc with the operating system on it. 1999 should be right in the ballpark, with any luck it's plain old Win 98.

I made a bit more progress last night. Basically started over and for whatever reason this time the Windows installation worked ok. No driver issues, no system properties weirdness, no locale issues (to be fair on that one I forgot you had to 'ok' after changing locale, then reboot, then it's all fine). So now I have a working system at least 😀

Reply 3 of 4, by chinny22

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Sorry it took longer than I was expecting. Moving soon so all my retro PC's are all packed away and its getting harder to find modern PC's with CD drives!

Below is the link to "System CD 2.6"
I ordered our Gateway with NT4 so don't have the corresponding Win98 CD. Although the NT4 CD was a stock standard OEM disc without any Gateway markings whatsoever so guessing they did much the same with Win98.

Never used the recovery option myself, First thing I did was wipe the preinstall, clean install of the OS, (both 9x and NT) and only used the Ensonic 1373 sound card drivers off this CD.
Will be interesting if this defaults the language to Australian (going off the volume label its localised for Oz) I suspect they were not that thorough though.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p_188g1LXfE3 … iew?usp=sharing

Reply 4 of 4, by Shadzilla

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No worries, thanks very much for doing that! It looks like it has all the drivers for my G6 so I'll give it a shot.

I did find that with the Gateway Win 98 disc I've got (sadly the only one on archive.org, which does contain basic OEM modifications for Gateway), it works better with the later system restore disc. The earlier one I tried which is more in line with the build date of my system, that has some weird issues although was mostly fine in the end. With a matched pair of system restore and OS discs the process was very smooth.

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