First post, by xxbeefydjxx
Hi folks,
first post here after falling across Vogons quite a bit when browsing generally "old" tech... I hope everyone is well!
Finally, after much waiting I laid my hands on a Packard Bell Multimedia 9016D (AKA the Executive MM 9016D)
The machine was pretty much original, however had a replacement Hard Drive and CD-ROM Drive.
I have since gone out and got 128mb Fast Page 70ms RAM (up from 16mb), slapped in a SATA adapter and a 500GB hdd (for all the goodies, I know this is way overkill for this PC)
Also got a GrafixStar 600 and Righteous 3D VooDoo 1 accelerator card, and managed to source and install a Pentium MMX 200. Machine already had a heatsink and fan installed on the CPU so they've been repurposed and paste replaced.
Final pieces, I added a NEC DVD-RW Drive and a Floppy Emulator (Gotek copy).
Everything boots and is detected 100%, and when tested with the original 1.2GB drive it booted into Windows 95 (Packard bell restored drive) and off it went, but it appeared tampered with and incomplete.
I'd like to be able to restore using the original restore CD and floppy for the machine, and have sourced the original UK Multimedia Restore CD for the machine, but for the life of me I can't get either the official Boot Floppies or the Universal Floppy to load the restore disks.
As expected, when you run this hardware combo with the original restore floppy it complains about no CD Drive detected, but when I run the universal restore floppy, with the burned recovery CD, it just goes in a circle asking me to insert the recovery cd and press enter?
I looked into the contents of a few of the floppies and they just contain executables, no batch files to edit... I'm straight out of luck when it comes to being able to modify these kinds of things but if anyone has any pointers and can assist, you'd be doing a huge favor!
I've been after this machine to chase childhood memories (my grandparents gifted me their Multimedia machine a good 15 years ago, HDD died and it was scrapped but it had everything. FM Tuner, Monitor, SRS Speakers, Microphone, remote, the works! ). I have yet to source the original UK CD Pack for these machines, but if anyone has any laying around they'd like to image or even sell, I'm in the right position to buy them for a good price. (The original restore CD/Floppy, and all the software bundled with it (Comix Zone/Ecco the Dolphin, the encyclopedia packs etc...)