Old Packard Bell Troubles!

[jalbes]

I just recently picked up a Packard Bell Force 2020 from my wifes aunt. My wife wants it to do basic word processing and budgetting. So after formatting it, I couldn't get the CD-Rom to work. Appearently you need the sound card drivers to be installed in order for the CD to be recognized!

Unfortunately, the original drivers were lost and I can't seem to find them anywhere on the net.

Does anyone know where I can find the drivers for the "Forte 16SBP Sound Card"?

[HAL9000]

If that uses the Aztech 1816 chipset, you can go here: http://www.aztechlabs.com/driver/sound_sc16.htm

[jalbes]

I dunno, weird.

I need the driver disk named forte 16sbp Disk #1.

Once installed my CD-Rom extensions will be found in the C:\FORTE16\UTILITY directory. This is what the manual states anyway.

I've been looking high and low and still no luck. Any other ideas?

[glc]

Pull your IDE cd drive, slave it to the hard drive, and use it to get Windows installed and copy the cabs to the hard drive. Windows should have the drivers for that proprietary interface so you can put the old drive back in. My research shows that this is a 486 - hope you are installing Win95 and not Win98!

[BFD Deadeye]

If George's suggestion won't work for you, read this (http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30189&highlight=packard+bell) post.

[HAL9000]

Originally posted by jalbes
I dunno, weird.

I need the driver disk named forte 16sbp Disk #1.

Once installed my CD-Rom extensions will be found in the C:\FORTE16\UTILITY directory. This is what the manual states anyway.

I've been looking high and low and still no luck. Any other ideas?

Did you check out the driver I listed, or just rule it out because I said Aztech? Many of the PB's used Aztech 1816 on the forte sound cards. Check out the chipset if you haven't.

[mouse1]

I have an old Pac Bell master C-D you may have if you think it might work for that machine,,Ley me know...GaryD.

[jalbes]

Originally posted by HAL9000


Did you check out the driver I listed, or just rule it out because I said Aztech? Many of the PB's used Aztech 1816 on the forte sound cards. Check out the chipset if you haven't.

I tried the driver that you linked to HAL, however it wouldn't work. I got win 3.1 on there right now, but I would like to put on Windows 95.

In the mean time I'm gonna check out the thread that BFD Deadeye linked to.

I'm gonna ignore glc's idea at the moment, although it is the most logical, it's way too much effort to do in this heat. No offence glc!!!

thanx,
jalbes

[jalbes]

The CD-rom is a panasonic that plugs into the panasonic propriatory IDE connector on the sound card.

So I went to Panasonic to Download the drivers, but they did't install properly. So I took glc's advice and connected my CD-Rom to it and tried to install windows 95.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough extended memory and setup fails. Is there a way to install windows 95 on this dinky 486sx with 4 megs of RAM? LOL

Thanks,
jalbes

[Streams]

it should install fine as i have done this before on a machine with the same specs. did you boot with a windows 95 boot disk with himem.sys?

[glc]

A 486sx with 4 megs will install 95 (original version ONLY, not OSR2, that requires a 486dx and 8 megs ram), but it will be SO slow that it will be unusable. Stick with 3.1 or add some more ram. Yes, you need himem.sys loaded and dos=high, and you do NOT want emm386.exe loaded. You cannot use a 98 bootdisk to do this due to these memory issues, 98 has too big a footprint. You have to make a Win95 original version startup disk and copy himem.sys, mscdex.exe, and a CD driver to it, and make a config.sys and an autoexec.bat on it.

Config.sys:

device = himem.sys
dos=high
device=cddriver.sys /d:mscd001

Autoexec.bat:

mscdex /d:mscd001

[jalbes]

ROFL

That is way too much effort. Maybe I'll just hop on ebay and pick up a pentium 133 or higher for her.

What a pain that old machine is. Jeeze. LOL

Thanx for all the help though!

jalbes