Gateway2000 P5-100 IDE HDD Trouble \ VOGONS

Gateway2000 P5-100 IDE HDD Trouble

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First post, by makkun586

Posted on 2023-05-24, 23:33

makkun586 Offline

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Joined: 2023-05-24, 13:36

Hello all, and please forgive me if this is not the board to ask for help on this issue.

My school has recently gotten rid of some old, way before my time, PC hardware. While searching around recycling centers for a case to fit one the motherboards, I found a Gateway2000 P5-100 desktop. I've been trying to get Win95 installed on it, but the problem I'm having is that none of the hard drives I've tried will get detected by the BIOS.

Here is a picture of both hard drives I've been testing:

and, here is a closeup on their jumper settings:

I've tried many IDE and jumper settings, but none seem to work. If the HDD is the only thing connected to the IDE cable, in any position, the BIOS will freeze trying to recognize it. If I have a CD-ROM drive connected, the same freeze happens unless both are set to cable select. Switching between the primary and secondary IDE slot on the motherboard doesn't help either. I know that the controllers are working, since Windows 95 setup can detect and read data off of both CD-ROM drives I've added to the system.

Here is a picture of the motherboard:

and, here is a close up of the switches on the motherboard:

This is the oldest PC I've worked with, but I'm not completely ignorant to IDE and IDE controllers. I feel like these drives are just too new for the motherboard, but I'm unsure what I could do to fix that. The IBM DeskStar was obtained from school also, and the WD drive was from an Xbox. I've disabled the Xbox's motherboard lock on the WD drive, and it shows up in modern Windows and can be initialized and formatted. I've bought one of those IDE to SD adapters, which should arrive soon, since they seem to work with most motherboards judging by reviews and YouTube videos I've seen. If you think it is a motherboard problem, then I'll post the pictures of the motherboards that my school got rid of. Maybe one of those boards would work better.

Have the days made you realize: so unwise, you are?

current PC specs: RTX 3060, Intel i7-12000F, 32gb RAM
Windows XP PC specs: GeForce 9600 GT, Intel Core 2 Quad q9500, 2gb RAM
Oldest Thing I Own PC specs: S3 Trio64V+, Pentium 1 100mhz, 8mb RAM

Reply 1 of 5, by Gmlb256

Posted on 2023-05-25, 00:28

Gmlb256 Offline

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Joined: 2018-04-11, 15:33

Hello and welcome!

The problem that you're seeing is a BIOS limitation regarding the maximum supported HDD size. It could be 8.4 GB in this case if the "32 GB clip" jumper settings on the IBM Deskstar HDD didn't work.

There are ways to get around the limitation:

BIOS update that increases the limit to 32 GB or more.
DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) such as OnTrack Disk Manager.
External PCI IDE controller.

Last edited by Gmlb256 on 2023-05-25, 00:44. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 2 of 5, by Horun

Posted on 2023-05-25, 00:38

Horun Offline

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Exactly. Most likely a 8GB HD limit, could even be less. Can you give the exact Gateway model #, should be on the back on a sticker. Also on the board maybe a yellow/tan sticker with motherboard part number.....
That board (like certain Compaq's) may require using Cable Select. So the HD set to cable on primary with one cable and CDROM set to cable on the secondary with another....
I knwo some early Pentiums still had that issue with some OEM's...

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 sangokushi

Posted on 2023-05-25, 02:14

sangokushi Offline

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Joined: 2020-09-01, 05:32

Retest with a 4GB hard drive / SD card. In this YouTube video, the system has a WDC AC34000L:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVVU089Db3M&t=995s

Last edited by sangokushi on 2023-05-25, 04:09. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 4 of 5, by jakethompson1

Posted on 2023-05-25, 03:51

jakethompson1 Offline

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Posts: 1319
Joined: 2015-11-17, 04:16

makkun586 wrote on 2023-05-24, 23:33:

This is the oldest PC I've worked with, but I'm not completely ignorant to IDE and IDE controllers. I feel like these drives are just too new for the motherboard, but I'm unsure what I could do to fix that. The IBM DeskStar was obtained from school also, and the WD drive was from an Xbox. I've disabled the Xbox's motherboard lock on the WD drive, and it shows up in modern Windows and can be initialized and formatted. I've bought one of those IDE to SD adapters, which should arrive soon, since they seem to work with most motherboards judging by reviews and YouTube videos I've seen. If you think it is a motherboard problem, then I'll post the pictures of the motherboards that my school got rid of. Maybe one of those boards would work better.

If your XP machine has IDE, you could temporarily move one of the drives to the XP machine and set a Host Protected Area on the drive. This causes the drive to lie to the BIOS about its capacity rather than you trying to find an actual 2GB, 4GB, or whatever the bug in this particular BIOS happens to be. One tool that can do this is Linux hdparm if you can boot into Linux live cd or live usb.

After setting the HPA you can either just settle for 4GB, 8GB, or whatever, or install overlay software as mentioned above that unlocks the true capacity on every boot, just so that the bios is fooled into not seeing the full capacity.

Reply 5 of 5, by makkun586

Posted on 2023-05-26, 17:46

makkun586 Offline

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Rank: Newbie
Posts: 2
Joined: 2023-05-24, 13:36

Horun wrote on 2023-05-25, 00:38:

Exactly. Most likely a 8GB HD limit, could even be less. Can you give the exact Gateway model #, should be on the back on a sticker. Also on the board maybe a yellow/tan sticker with motherboard part number.....
That board (like certain Compaq's) may require using Cable Select. So the HD set to cable on primary with one cable and CDROM set to cable on the secondary with another....
I knwo some early Pentiums still had that issue with some OEM's...

Here's a pic of the back of the case where the identifying stickers are:

I've found the motherboard for the system on theretroweb. Here's a link to the motherboard: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/intel- … vanced-zp-zappa

I've also made a comparison between GecRyan's pic on theretroweb and my motherboard:

The IDE to SD adapter does work, but only when the inserted SD is less than 2gb, so it totally is an issue with the HDD size. theretroweb hosts a bios file from Gateway that allows for larger HDD, so I'll work on installing that. However, the system's original floppy disk drive has broke and none of my replacements play nice with the system. They're recognized and set as A: in the BIOS, but keep saying "Drive not ready" even with media present. I'll try to figure something out, like imaging the SD card to boot into some tiny OS to dump original BIOS and flash the updated BIOS.

Have the days made you realize: so unwise, you are?

current PC specs: RTX 3060, Intel i7-12000F, 32gb RAM
Windows XP PC specs: GeForce 9600 GT, Intel Core 2 Quad q9500, 2gb RAM
Oldest Thing I Own PC specs: S3 Trio64V+, Pentium 1 100mhz, 8mb RAM

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