I purchased a robust collection of an Axcel 130 along with its monitor, boxes, manuals, peripherals. I was really enticed by the stickers on the desktop which promised "Packard Bell Navigator", Microsoft Works, etc, but the Packard Bell specific stuff was sadly missing from the hard disk, as it looks like someone reinstalled vanilla Windows on it.

The monitor has a problem where the power button has become momentary, meaning, you have to keep your finger held down on the button for the monitor to stay on. As soon as you let go, it turns off. I am thinking of either soldering the circuit closed and just using an outlet switch, or replacing the button with something new. I haven't gotten around to this yet but I do plan on fixing it.

The set came from RE:PC in Seattle. It was definitely running there at one point. But when I powered it on at home, I was met with:

Reference ID 17 […]
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Reference ID 17

Shutdown failure
Invalid configuration information - please run SETUP program
Press the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility

No boot device available -
Press F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility

Of course based on the error message, the clock battery ran out while the machine was unplugged, and it forgot some of those settings. Usually you should be able to continue on with default settings and at least boot into something, so that's what I tried.

Now, inside the machine we have a 214 mb IDE hard drive, a 5.25 floppy drive, and a 3.5 floppy drive.

I've tried to boot to a floppy using the included drive (which the shop informed me wasn't reliable) and a few of my own drives, to no avail. Although it's possible that the floppy disk I was using was faulty. (I only had one that would format)

I took the drive out, put it into another machine with an IDE interface, and imaged the drive using Clonezilla. This image was moved to a virtual machine. The VM wouldn't boot. I booted a floppy image on the VM, and ran "SYS C:" from DOS. Then, my VM's image would boot.

So my guess was that the hard drive's MBR and/or DOS system files were broken.

I Clonezilla'ed the VM image onto a 512mb CF drive. This was confirmed to boot into DOS on another machine. So I Clonezilla'ed the CF drive back onto the Axcel's hard drive, and from linux, DD'ed the MBR bytes for good measure. Weirdly though, my other machine would only boot from the CF drive, it wouldn't boot from the Axcel drive even after the MBR "repair" with DD.

And still, I was met with the same error messages on the Axcel.

So the Axcel is refusing to boot from:
* Its own hard drive
* Any floppy I give it
* The CF adapter

Back to the error message, you could press F2 to go into SETUP. On modern computers this would take you into a ROM program, but on this machine SETUP is a program that would run from some kind of disk - something I don't think I have. Currently, pressing F2 spins the floppy drive, but nothing happens.

Looking at the robust User Guide it came with, I don't see any relevant motherboard jumpers that could be helpful

I would like some help on what to do next!

My thoughts were:
1. Try out a new floppy disk and/or drive
2. Try to hunt down this SETUP.exe
3. Inspect the motherboard for any signs of corrosion
4. Try an IDE/ISA controller if there is any problem with the existing controller - although I doubt this would boot, right?