How I tricked my Packard Bell Restore disc.

[Kenneth]

I used Bochs and a customized Award Bios (Atrend ATC-6100 Beta BIOS).

Make sure the ID has the following String:

Code: Select all

11/27/02-ALADDIN5-2A5KKG5D-00

Make sure that the Description is:

Code: Select all

FR510 BIOS REV: SCC-128

And the setup ID is:

Code: Select all

2A5KKG5D

Make a 2GB disk, and put it in your Bochsrc file.

Extract the Boot Image and edit Restore.bat and remove FMTCHK 1024 and the ERRORLEVEL commands, place the file in the image.

Use the extracted edited floppy image as Drive A: and make sure the Restore CD ISO is in the CD Drive.

Start up bochs and you're done!

[Marcello]

Offtopic Comment

Is there any way you can extract the background image for me??

[Kenneth]

Offtopic Comment

Is there any way you can extract the background image for me??

It's in the Windows 98 Plus Pack.

[TheWahbinator]

That's pretty sweet, although I wouldn't want to use Bochs since it's too slow. I've been trying many methods, and using Step-by-Step confirmation with the CD boot fails since SWITCHES=/N is included in config.sys. In addition, I tried editing restore.bat but that doesn't do anything since it's actually restore.exe that does the BIOS check.
Also you should find a way to get everything from \Apps to install (I think there's something in \Win98\Windows\Options\Gts that extracts those packages)

Finally, what's funny is that back in 1999 I had two PB Multimedia L1100s, in serial number succession. Mine had Award BIOS and brown motherboard PCB, the other one had AMIBIOS and green motherboard PCB! I seriously had no idea why this happened.

[Kenneth]

That's pretty sweet, although I wouldn't want to use Bochs since it's too slow. I've been trying many methods, and using Step-by-Step confirmation with the CD boot fails since SWITCHES=/N is included in config.sys. In addition, I tried editing restore.bat but that doesn't do anything since it's actually restore.exe that does the BIOS check.
Also you should find a way to get everything from \Apps to install (I think there's something in \Win98\Windows\Options\Gts that extracts those packages)

Finally, what's funny is that back in 1999 I had two PB Multimedia L1100s, in serial number succession. Mine had Award BIOS and brown motherboard PCB, the other one had AMIBIOS and green motherboard PCB! I seriously had no idea why this happened.

I use bochs for simply copying the files, then I mount the image and copy everything to a VHD and then I use VPC.

And I also use bochs because it supports the Award BIOS (i440fx chipset) and my PB PC is dead, fried mobo.

[TheWahbinator]

Hold on a sec, it doesn't let me enter more than 28 characters for the BIOS Info line so it cuts off at "11/27/02-ALADDIN5-2A5KKG5D-0" without the final 0.

[Kenneth]

Hold on a sec, it doesn't let me enter more than 28 characters for the BIOS Info line so it cuts off at "11/27/02-ALADDIN5-2A5KKG5D-0" without the final 0.

It's fine, remove the 0.

[TheWahbinator]

In order for it to actually move at a bearable speed I had to set

Code: Select all

[log]
error=ignore

or else it would record whenever every byte was read from the CDROM to the console, making the emulation go at like 1/20th of the speed. However I keep getting this message:


this happened even after upping the drive to 3GB (which my PB system came with)

Edit: This happens when the command "FMTCHK 1024" is ran and returns and errorlevel of 4. Apparently it doesn't show that my drive is bigger than 1GB (even though FDISK succesfully recognizes all of it). I'll try using the included PQMagic to partition this time.

[Kenneth]

Remove the FMTCHK 1024 and ERRORLEVEL lines from the boot floppy image.

[TheWahbinator]

I just ran restore.exe solo, and it did a file copy process instead of showing the menu. I transferred to a dynamically expanding VHD using Winimage (apparently it can do that, I never knew) and VPC is doing the Win98 install process. Hopefully it'll do all of the postinstall commands and run preptool automatically. Thanks for all the help.

[TheWahbinator]

About time it worked. While it did install properly, it only had the Packard Bell wallpaper and specialized OOBE. None of the custom applications installed using GTINST (only the aforementioned). So I snooped around for the proper batch to install all of the compressed apps and found instbase.gtf, but from the CD not the C:\Windows\Options\Gts directory. And so I ran

Code: Select all

gtinst.exe Q:\Apps\instbase.gtf install

and that successfully installed the rest of the applications. I feel totally nostalgic now, this is 10 years ago all over again

[Kenneth]

Mine is installing Applications right now unattended in VMWare.

[PTL]

Nice! IIRC my first computer was a Packard bell! (well, it was more my dad's computer. y'see, i was 4 at the time...I played The Incredible Machine all the time on it.)

[Kenneth]

Installed! I can feel the nostalgia creeping up.

[The Distractor]

Hah. I don't have any Packard Bell recovery media ...

I successfully cracked the bioslock protection on IBM ThinkPad 380XD recovery CD though (w95 OSR2 + IE4!!)
You can do this on a real pc too !

Basically, boot from the CD and keep on pressing F8. Load everything except RECOVERY.SYS driver in config.sys, and DON'T run autoexec.bat. At the command prompt; run autoexec.bat (this is so we don't have to say yes to every line in every batch file).

Keep on doing this over a number of reboots until we hit a command prompt.

get to whatever is the ramdrive (should be there already?!) and type:

Code: Select all

MSCDEX /D:ibmcd001 /M:10 /L:Z
pkunzip -# -d -Jhrs -o Z:\*.IMZ C:\
bsecr

After all this is done, take CD out, reboot, should boot up win95.
If it doesn't, go apply a win95 bootsector to drive C: (bootw9x.com, sys c: on w95 bootdisk. whatever ).

[ddrmaxromance]

Ah, this does indeed bring back nostalgia back in the Windows 98 days. However, my only PB Restore disc was back in 1994 when it came with WFW 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22. It was probably the most stable computer ever during the DOS and 3.x days as it ran all the most recent software. The problem? Windows 95 would take over next year and pretty much the internet would take over the next two decades. lol. Although there are many internet program for Win3.x, it's pretty hard to run today's websites with Web 2.0 standards.

[TheWahbinator]

Seems like your disc was 98 first edition OCManage. Mine was second edition, and came with Money instead of Quicken but almost everything is the same (CyberTrio, iRiS loaded up when I extracted them).

[Kenneth]

Seems like your disc was 98 first edition OCManage. Mine was second edition, and came with Money instead of Quicken but almost everything is the same (CyberTrio, iRiS loaded up when I extracted them).

Yep, bought that machine in late '98.

[TheWahbinator]

Which makes this interesting since mine was bought a year later, yet the same BIOS trick worked.

[Kenneth]

Which makes this interesting since mine was bought a year later, yet the same BIOS trick worked.

The restore engine is the same, I have version 2.0i1. Plus it's a regular PB Mobo, what Mobo/Processor/Chipset did you have?

[TheWahbinator]

It was an AMD K6-2 400mhz CPU, not sure about the chipset but the integrated video was SiS 530 if that helps.

[Kenneth]

It was an AMD K6-2 400mhz CPU, not sure about the chipset but the integrated video was SiS 530 if that helps.

AMD K6-2 333MHz CPU and ALi 1541 ALLADiN Chipset with Rage IIc integrated graphics for me.