I recently found a complete and fully functional Acer Aspire 5120SB mini-tower system from 1995 with it's accompanying CRT monitor and mouse + keyboard being thrown out last week, and I decided to restore it to working condition.

Sadly, while the machine itself seems perfectly fine, it seems I'm having a hard time getting Windows 95c running with any CD-rom support, and any drives above 2GB (even though the bios seems to read up to 8gb) suffer from format/corruption problems.

Also I can't seem to find a manual or any technical specs for this system anywhere on the net, so I don't really know what I can do to fix these problems though I did pinpoint some problems so far:

1. This system has the (infamous) CMD PCI-0640 PCI-IDE controller and according to this link below, Windows 95 has a problem with an IDE controller that requires
serialization between the primary and secondary IDE channels but not a way to resolve it. The CD-Rom is on the 2nd IDE controller by itself, as a master drive.
I've tried some updated drivers I found around the net to try to fix it, but WIndows 95 either locks up when I try to update it in normal mode, and it updates in safe-mode, but MS-Dos compatibility is still forced afterwards.
http://www.jdresearch.com/ide.html

2. I did get a 4gb drive working by setting it's jumpers to a special hardware compatibility mode, so the bios sees it as a normal 2gb drive, but Win95 as a 4gb drive. I haven't tried to see if it corrupts if it fills past 2gb but I'll test that once I get the cd rom drive working.

3. I also have Dos 6.22 with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups installed on the master drive on the 1st IDE controller, with Windows 95c on the slave drive. Everything seems to be fine in DOS/Win3.11 except .WAV file playback, but I can use it to move files from it's drive using Win95.

4. Once I get this working correctly, I would to try to find a 8gb+ drive that I could use with this system if any are compatible with the 2gb/8gb limit plus a faster pentium, or socket compatible cpu. Not sure how updated the bios is since I can't find any info on this machine but I will update if anyone knows what bios update it needs.

If anyone has any ideas, manuals, drives, etc I can use please let me know.

Thanks,
Jason M.

Here are the fulls specs of this system:
CPU- 120 MHz Pentium 1 (Non-mmx)
RAM- 40mb of EDO simm
GPU- Cirrus Logic 5150 (1mb) On-Board
SOUND- Sound Blaster 16 Virba (CT2800) + Sierra AccSound FaxModem SQ 3230 PnP
HDD1: Western Digital Caviar 11200 (~1.3 GB) with Plop Boot Manager to boot between the 2 drives
HDD2: Western Digital Caviar 24300 (4.3 GB) with "Special Settings" enabled.
CD-ROM1: Mitsumi 4x CD-Rom (CRMC-FX-400)
Network: 3COM EtherLink III (3c509-TPO) ISA