Does anyone know how to pull down the lever on the 5.25 fdd on the pb? If i twist it, it does not move very far. I have used these old drives before, just not one like this.

Packard Bell is not generally known for quality products.

Anyway, you may have to insert a disk into the drive before the lever will actually move.

Packard bell is a pretty good brand IMO. Anyway, I will try with a disk in it. But I've had many machines which their brands were regarded as cheap (emachines, other budget pc's) and they last forever and brands that are good (dell, HP) that take a shit (that means dying)in a few years. Id say that packard bell is a good brand, considering ive had machines of theres that work fine at over 20+ years and the one was in somebody's damp moldy basement and it still worked.

ahendricks18 wrote:

Packard bell is a pretty good brand IMO. Anyway, I will try with a disk in it. But I've had many machines which their brands were regarded as cheap (emachines, other budget pc's) and they last forever and brands that are good (dell, HP) that take a shit (that means dying)in a few years. Id say that packard bell is a good brand, considering ive had machines of theres that work fine at over 20+ years and the one was in somebody's damp moldy basement and it still worked.

Packard Bell generally took shortcuts with their hardware design (cacheless pentium 1 systems for instance, or the use of quantum bigfoots). While many of the systems run today, they were designed with a price point in mind.

It is weird to have a bottom of the barrel PC run while quality hardware fails-- but you can bet your money every e-machine has low quality capacitors, messy voltage, and is just waiting to kill a HDD, memory, CPU or peripheral cards.

It works, but i dont have the option to boot from drive B (3.5) and when i get the "non sytem disk error" it seeks for a disk in drive a (5.25) they are labeled a and b but idk how to boot from the 3.5 disk.

These are designed with the 5.25" as the primary drive, i.e. you can't boot from the 3.5".

You could try swapping the cable (3.5" on the 5.25" connector and vice versa) and adjusting the BIOS accordingly, provided you have a cable with both types of connectors in every position (5 in total) and a BIOS with this option.

I tried a different IDE FDD Cable and it works now. I just am having some issues w/ the hdd. Ive looked up the Seagate model no on it and it gives different parameters on diff websites. If I try them i am prompted to enter the bios and it says "Fixed disk type was incorrect. Review settings." I will keep messing with it.

The hdd is seagate model ST3120A.

Alright, i found out that the IDE cable was unplugged so that was a bit of a fail.

EDIT:
I opened the machine and its really cool. Got an AdLib sound card and I added a modem. Not exactly a period correct one, its from late 90's so I'll look out for a different one. Im really digging this old PC!