Recovery disks for Packard Bell Multimedia PB400 \ VOGONS

Recovery disks for Packard Bell Multimedia PB400

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First post, by wbahnassi

Posted on 2021-11-09, 01:52

wbahnassi Offline

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Hi guys, I've got this magnificent Packard Bell Multimedia PC working beautifully:

Its model number is PB400. It has a 486SX 25MHz processor and a 170MB HDD. It also has onboard Oak VGA and originally includes a TV tuner card (which I replaced with an ATI VGA Wonder here, and added a CF2IDE card to the back).
Its original sound card is SB Pro CT1600 with the 1x Creative CDROM with caddy using Panasonic (or Sony, I dont know) connector on the SB Pro card.

The HDD still has the original OEM software with Windows 3.1 that has the Packard Bell logo on startup. I tried searching for the recovery CD/disk for this PC but couldn't find specifically this model. I want to format it and start fresh since the PC was obviously used for quite a while and has some errors in Windows here and there.

Any pointers to this PC's recovery software would be highly appreciated.

Cheers!

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IBM BlueLightning 100MHz, CL5428, SB16, 4x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, RTX2060

Reply 1 of 3, by dormcat

Posted on 2021-11-09, 10:49

dormcat Offline

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wbahnassi wrote on 2021-11-09, 01:52:

Its original sound card is SB Pro CT1600 with the 1x Creative CDROM with caddy using Panasonic (or Sony, I dont know) connector on the SB Pro card.

That's the same pair of sound card / CD-ROM I had 28 years ago. To be more exact, the CD-ROM was a rebadged Panasonic / Matsushita-Kotobuki CR-521-C.

However, I wouldn't hold my breath for an official recovery CD, as the CD-ROM interface was proprietary and not ATAPI compatible, and BIOS supporting bootable CD came even later. The Dell XPS Pentium I bought in 1995 that came with NEC CDR-273 4x ATAPI CD-ROM provided no recovery CD but the MS Win95 CD-ROM plus some floppy disks for drivers and utilities, although contents of those floppies could still be downloaded from Dell's official website.

If Packard Bell was really caring its customers, a workable recovery CD must have an accompanying bootable floppy with necessary driver (namely, SBPCD.SYS) and MSCDEX.EXE to start the CD-ROM, then run the recovery program on CD to return the system back to factory presets.

Reply 2 of 3, by wbahnassi

Posted on 2021-11-09, 12:13

wbahnassi Offline

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Joined: 2020-06-03, 00:45

I've seen some recovery CDs for other Packard Bell PC models on the internetz, and yes, they come with a floppy disk to boot and init the CD drive. I expect this model to be no different.

Speaking of the drive, it doesn't recognize my CD-RW disc. Haven't tried it with CD-R though, hopefully it works. Worst case, I have the CF Card which I can copy the recovery CD contents to and start them from there.

Reply 3 of 3, by dormcat

Posted on 2021-11-09, 13:22

dormcat Offline

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I see. It's those "Master CD" on Internet Archive, like this one.

More info available at http://pbplanet.info/wiki/index.php/Packard_Bell_Master_CDs

wbahnassi wrote on 2021-11-09, 12:13:

Speaking of the drive, it doesn't recognize my CD-RW disc. Haven't tried it with CD-R though, hopefully it works. Worst case, I have the CF Card which I can copy the recovery CD contents to and start them from there.

CD-RW was commercially available in 1997, at least four years later than CR-521-C, so it's natural for the drive not recognizing CD-RW discs with low reflection ratio.

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