TO ALL PACKARD BELL (Pentium 1) OWNERS: NEED YOUR ATTENTION

I've been brought a wonderful box to fix. It's a P150 on a Packard Bell NEC E153 mobo with the 430VX chipset. The problem with this is: The HDD has been reformatted without a driver disk. Because of this, the CD-ROM, modem, etc. fail to function. This is a huge problem, as you can imagine.

Full Chipset designation: 82437VX 430VX
Current BIOS: Intel 1.00.08.DN0R

If you just happen to have drivers for this board, please contact me. I know it's a long shot...

Thanks much for any assistance you can provide.

I'm posting this thread in two parts of the forums so that hopefully someone will notice it.

Just go into bios and set to boot from CDROm i it has that option. Put a WIN98 CD in the drive and it should boot off of it. However, some of those boards didn't have that capability.

OR

Go to http://www.bootdisk.com and download a Win98 bootdisk, this will have the CDROM drivers on it. Boot from that floppy and install WIN98 from the CD. The modem should be picked up by Plug and Pray. You can just use "Generic" modem and most modems will work.

I installed Win98 on a friends Packard Bell. I could not get the Cd Rom to work. It turned out that the CD Rom controller was built into the sound card, and these drivers have to be loaded first. I tried everything I could think of, but I think these drivers have to be loaded before anything else. I ended up selling him my IDE CD Rom, and upgrading mine. It worked fine, there is an IDE port on the motherboard. The sound card also had a built in modem, I think it was 14.4. It was disabled, it had been upgraded to a 56k earlier. It had a pentium 90, I upgraded it to an Evergreen 200 that I had.

You're right about the CDROM controller being on the sound card. Also, the modem is located here. There are, of course, no drivers for the sound card, and I'm looking for a serial/part number so that I can find out what kind of card this is. I'd like to get this rig working as it was, but I can't work on it any more tonight. I got a lot of progress made (Intel had chipset drivers that sped up performance) tonight, but I'm beat. I've been up way too late recently, and I have a big weekend. Thanks for the replies.

Thanks skip. I picked up a few things from bootdisk and I'm going to work with them tomorrow.

If anyone else has any ideas, and solutions, or any sites that will have antiquated driver archives, I'd be most appreciative.

Thanks much to all.

When I was trying to get the CD Rom working I was all over the web trying to get the drivers. I found post after post of people trying to get these things to work. I found drivers, I can't remember where, but I guess I never installed them right. I think they have to be installed before anything else. I remeber reading an old post where someone said that the drivers create a port for the CD Rom. The Packard Bell site bites, not much hope there. I think I found the ones I found by looking for them by the CD Rom, I think it was a Panasonic. Another reason I gave up on it was that it is only a 4x.

For old sound card drivers, I look at the chip on the sound card and plug the chip # into Google. I have gotten lucky and Google found downloadable drivers for older cards. Same methodology for video cards and modems has worked for me also.

Those old slow CD-ROMs that use the IDE port on the sound card need to load the old DOS drivers in the autoexec.bat and config.sys files because they are not plug and pray devices. Usually when you download them, there is a DOS utility program that walks you through the process. They can be a pain in the hinny sometimes. I usually don't have much trouble using generic Windows .inf files for those old socket 7 mobos. I've build or upgraded at least a half a dozen of them this winter. Those P-150 CPUs are really a P-166 in disguise. Just change the jumper from 60 FSB to 66 FSB, no problem.

"Those P-150 CPUs are really a P-166 in disguise. Just change the jumper from 60 FSB to 66 FSB, no problem."

how do you know? I did hear that about the MMX series, but not the classic

The P-150 and P-166 is the same CPU, one runs at 60 FSB and the other at 66 FSB. It's a no brainer. I've overclocked two of those P-150 in the past. A lady I work with has one of my old P-150 running at 166 MHz that she still uses. No cooling changes or voltage increase needed at all. If you don't want to take my word for it, then go read the overclocking guide at Tom's Hardware.

batboy said:

The P-150 and P-166 is the same CPU, one runs at 60 FSB and the other at 66 FSB. It's a no brainer. I've overclocked two of those P-150 in the past. A lady I work with has one of my old P-150 running at 166 MHz that she still uses. No cooling changes or voltage increase needed at all. If you don't want to take my word for it, then go read the overclocking guide at Tom's Hardware.

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I take your word. its the same cpu, your just overclocking it. the same can be said about the 300a celeron. when you run it at 450, your just changing the fsb to 100. not all made 450. same story, not all 150's made 166

I've never heard of a P-150 not being able to do an easy 166 MHz.

batboy said:

I've never heard of a P-150 not being able to do an easy 166 MHz.

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out of how many chips? granted, its only a 11% OC, but there can be rare cases, still, especially for the classics. the mmx OC far better

I have to agree that the MMX overclocks better than the Classic Pentium, but the Classic is what really started the overclocking thing to become popular. The early Pentiums did not overclock so well, but starting with the P-120 and P-133 and up, the majority did quite well, considering most motherboards back then had limited voltage selection and we rarely did much to improve the cooling. I've overclocked at least 8 Classics and 2 MMXs and all would run at least one step higher than default. Of course, it is always possibly that you could stumble across a dog P-150 that won't overclock. But, I bet that's a rare case indeed.

agreed. oh have you heard of 75@100MHz? alot of people say its a good overclocker

I was looking on www.computergeeks.com and found a Packard Bell restore disk there for only like 30 cents. I dont know if this is the fix to your problem, but it might be worth checking out.

TUK101 said:

I was looking on www.computergeeks.com and found a Packard Bell restore disk there for only like 30 cents. I dont know if this is the fix to your problem, but it might be worth checking out.

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Thanks much for the link TUK, I'll check it out.

That's exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks again TUK. $5.00 to ship a $.29 CD...oh well.

Thanks again for the help.

No problem man. When you get it PM me and tell me how it works, cause I have an old P133 Packard Bell comp and was thinking on paying the 5.00 shipping charge for a nearly free restore cd myself lol. Good Luck and glad to help.

I was digging around through my old discs yesterday to try and find something that might be of use and, what do you know, I found a CD driver disc. I've never had to install CD drivers except with my burner (and XP did everything for me), so I wouldn't think that drivers would be necessary. It's an old computer, though, and I'm not too familiar with them. Hope things start to fall into place.

Thanks for all the replies, I'll let you guys know how it comes out.

Arent those old comps a bugger when they arent working right? Man, the techs from the old days had thier work cut out for them didnt they? I have learned most of what I do know about comps form my trials and errors when working mainly with Packard Bells. Those in my opinion where the hardest darned things to get to work reliably. With Windows 95 installed on my sisters PB plug and play was a joke and I had to manually install just about every piece of hardware that I upgraded for her (sound card, video card, modem, etc.) Even when installing newer hardware the comp seemed to forget that it was installed on occasion. What I finally ended up doing as a permanent fix was get her set up with a 366 Celeron based machine with Windows 98 on it. I just plaine got tired of messing with that comp, lol, and pretty much gave her the Celeron based machine in trade for the PB one. Now I have the PB machine and it is my headache and I dont have to worry about my sister having problems quite so much. I am going to give the PB machine to my kids to learn about comps on and learn how to run one. When they get the hang of it I will build them simple machines so that they can game with me lol. Good luck with your Packard Bell. There is a reason that they went out of bussiness you know lol.