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Aptiva 2144-141, error 99 - invalid path specified when starting recovery

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First post, by Paadam

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Obtained a nice Aptiva (original Pentium 100MHz, now 166MHz, 64MB RAM, original 1.2GB HDD, optical drive etc. Everything works and I wanted to make fresh original W95 install using original Aptiva recovery media (for 2144-M51 which uses same hardware, including Opti chipset system board or planar as IBM calls it) but ran into obstacle: boots just fine with original boot disk mounted to Gotek, prompts to format HDD which it does without problem, then begins to load from CD and throws error 99 - invalid path specified and stops at DOS prompt C:\.
CD access does not seem to be a problem, can easily access it from DOS (it is drive D).

Any ideas?

Many 3Dfx and Pentium III-S stuff.
My amibay FS thread: www.amibay.com/showthread.php?88030-Man ... -370-dual)

Reply 2 of 5, by Horun

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Isn't the 2144-m51, 2144-131 and 2144-141 nearly identical ? I found a 2144-131 recovery disk at Archive org
https://archive.org/details/V95SU0D
but not for 2144-51 (seems it was removed):
"https://archive.org › details › Image Not Found! IBM Aptiva 2144 M51 Recovery CD. Nov 11, 2019"

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 3 of 5, by Azriel_Strife

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Horun wrote on 2022-10-05, 00:35:

Isn't the 2144-m51, 2144-131 and 2144-141 nearly identical ? I found a 2144-131 recovery disk at Archive org

I have a few different versions, one is the m51 version from another user here on the forum but as soon as it tries to load from cd is gives the error 99 message. I have tried 8 different cd-rom drives and they all work just fine in windows. The boot disk loads cd rom drivers without issue and i can browse the cd's in dos as well.

Reply 4 of 5, by Paadam

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It was still the problem of model being slightly different.

Many 3Dfx and Pentium III-S stuff.
My amibay FS thread: www.amibay.com/showthread.php?88030-Man ... -370-dual)

Reply 5 of 5, by Horun

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The 2144-51 recovery cd is here: https://archive.org/details/ibmaptiva2144m51recoverycd. Not sure why when I tried to get the ISO ten days ago archive org gave me an error.
Are you using the exact recovery floppy for the exact ISO ? You cannot use a diff recovery floppy than what the ISO has (some are inside the \recovery folder (recovery.img and use LoadDSKF.exe to make it)
The 2144-51 has one called: "IBM Aptiva 2144-M51 boot disk.img" that you can use Winimage to write the floppy.
Note the recovery ZIPS use "magic" as the password on most of the 21XX restore cd's AFAIK.

added: can you boot off the HD ? If you can is it Win95a dos or is it something else ? The recovery disk for -M51 and -131 have Win95a on them.
If it were me I would SYS the HD with a Win95a DSP floppy so it boots Win95a dos, then add himem.sys, mscdex, cdrom driver, etc to C and get it so it can see the cdrom from the HD.
Then I would mount cdrom and go into the \recovery folder and run the makedirs.bat and see if it creates all the folders on the HD that would be created by Install.exe on the recovery boot floppy.
if it does then you could actually manually unpack the zips to those folders by running D:\RECOVERY\US\PKUNZIP.EXE -smagic -$ -d -JHSR -o D:\RECOVERY\US\APTIVA*.ZIP C:\

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

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