VOGONS


First post, by UntrustedInstance

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Hey all! It's been a hot minute since I've posted here but I just got my hands on a Gateway Essential 667, it arrived yesterday and when booted I discovered that the HDD was blank so I installed Windows 98 which went fine, but now I have no drivers and I cannot find anything online about this computer aside from a youtube video of someone putting windows XP on it. Someone on reddit pointed me to a generic recovery disc that wouldnt even install the drivers and upon manually installing the ones it was trying to install nothing worked. Plus, it only detected audio and my multimedia keyboard, not my PCI modem/ethernet cards or my chipset/video.

On top of that, I decided I would try XP Media Center Edition which would bluescreen with a stop code that reported that the boot device was not ready and then after that the PC wouldnt even boot from CD-ROMS. I managed to get MS-DOS running on it because the floppy drive still works but the computer at this point doesnt even give me an option to boot from CD-ROMS at this point.
I've tried unplugging the IDE cables, rebooting without the drives hooked up, and then replugging which at least worked for a little bit.

I managed to get Mini Windows 3.11 booted and I was going to try and use that to format the drive and boot from CD but still to no avail.

I really don't want to return it but I'm having a lot of trouble with this. If anyone is able to be of assistance I would forever be indebted to you.

Reply 1 of 2, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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UntrustedInstance wrote on 2025-07-07, 01:53:
Hey all! It's been a hot minute since I've posted here but I just got my hands on a Gateway Essential 667, it arrived yesterday […]
Show full quote

Hey all! It's been a hot minute since I've posted here but I just got my hands on a Gateway Essential 667, it arrived yesterday and when booted I discovered that the HDD was blank so I installed Windows 98 which went fine, but now I have no drivers and I cannot find anything online about this computer aside from a youtube video of someone putting windows XP on it. Someone on reddit pointed me to a generic recovery disc that wouldnt even install the drivers and upon manually installing the ones it was trying to install nothing worked. Plus, it only detected audio and my multimedia keyboard, not my PCI modem/ethernet cards or my chipset/video.

On top of that, I decided I would try XP Media Center Edition which would bluescreen with a stop code that reported that the boot device was not ready and then after that the PC wouldnt even boot from CD-ROMS. I managed to get MS-DOS running on it because the floppy drive still works but the computer at this point doesnt even give me an option to boot from CD-ROMS at this point.
I've tried unplugging the IDE cables, rebooting without the drives hooked up, and then replugging which at least worked for a little bit.

I managed to get Mini Windows 3.11 booted and I was going to try and use that to format the drive and boot from CD but still to no avail.

I really don't want to return it but I'm having a lot of trouble with this. If anyone is able to be of assistance I would forever be indebted to you.

Can be handy to have the correct restore disc if you're after the full Gateway 'look and feel', but as this likely has an Intel motherboard (this one https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/intel- … illow-springs-e ) then the latest reference drivers there will likely work just as well.

That being said, it's still possible to track down individual Gateway driver packages for most components like sound, video etc. If the board I linked above is indeed what your system has (Gateway motherboard codename Bryant) then you can find pointers to relevant individual driver packages at this archived Gateway link - https://web.archive.org/web/20021222204915/ht … .asp?pn=2511388

Searching by using the 'download now' filenames from that archived link, here are a couple to start with...

W98 Audio - https://lt.softoware.org/get-7508076-exe.html?ir=1

W98 Video - https://lt.softoware.org/get-7510797-exe.html?ir=1

Reply 2 of 2, by UntrustedInstance

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PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2025-07-07, 04:44:
Can be handy to have the correct restore disc if you're after the full Gateway 'look and feel', but as this likely has an Intel […]
Show full quote
UntrustedInstance wrote on 2025-07-07, 01:53:
Hey all! It's been a hot minute since I've posted here but I just got my hands on a Gateway Essential 667, it arrived yesterday […]
Show full quote

Hey all! It's been a hot minute since I've posted here but I just got my hands on a Gateway Essential 667, it arrived yesterday and when booted I discovered that the HDD was blank so I installed Windows 98 which went fine, but now I have no drivers and I cannot find anything online about this computer aside from a youtube video of someone putting windows XP on it. Someone on reddit pointed me to a generic recovery disc that wouldnt even install the drivers and upon manually installing the ones it was trying to install nothing worked. Plus, it only detected audio and my multimedia keyboard, not my PCI modem/ethernet cards or my chipset/video.

On top of that, I decided I would try XP Media Center Edition which would bluescreen with a stop code that reported that the boot device was not ready and then after that the PC wouldnt even boot from CD-ROMS. I managed to get MS-DOS running on it because the floppy drive still works but the computer at this point doesnt even give me an option to boot from CD-ROMS at this point.
I've tried unplugging the IDE cables, rebooting without the drives hooked up, and then replugging which at least worked for a little bit.

I managed to get Mini Windows 3.11 booted and I was going to try and use that to format the drive and boot from CD but still to no avail.

I really don't want to return it but I'm having a lot of trouble with this. If anyone is able to be of assistance I would forever be indebted to you.

Can be handy to have the correct restore disc if you're after the full Gateway 'look and feel', but as this likely has an Intel motherboard (this one https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/intel- … illow-springs-e ) then the latest reference drivers there will likely work just as well.

That being said, it's still possible to track down individual Gateway driver packages for most components like sound, video etc. If the board I linked above is indeed what your system has (Gateway motherboard codename Bryant) then you can find pointers to relevant individual driver packages at this archived Gateway link - https://web.archive.org/web/20021222204915/ht … .asp?pn=2511388

Searching by using the 'download now' filenames from that archived link, here are a couple to start with...

W98 Audio - https://lt.softoware.org/get-7508076-exe.html?ir=1

W98 Video - https://lt.softoware.org/get-7510797-exe.html?ir=1

holy mother of god thank you so much!!! its getting late, I'll try tomorrow and keep you posted! It'll help that I have a buddy dropping off some CD-RWs I can use
Thank you so much!