Help please.... 486 build I need someone who knows what they are doing

4poosaday

4poosaday

4poosaday

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Hi,
I'm new to this forum so hello to you all.
I've been given a 486 dx2 80 cpu with motherboard, ram, cd drive, floppy drive and vga card.
I've got win95 on cd and I've made a win98 boot disk to boot from.
I can't for the life of me get it to install win95, just keeps locking up, the pc will even lock up while on the a: prompt.
Does anyone know off anywhere I could send it to.. ie if there is someone on here who fixes these ? If anyone would be willing to help it would be appreciated.
 
Hello to you too.

With any PC issues, it's always better to strip back to find issues.

If this was me, I'd reset the bios settings to default settings and download any DOS based diagnostic utilities and run those. Have a look at Phil's Computer lab website and YouTube channel for such utilities.

Forget about Windows 95 which would run sluggishly on such a machine and maybe look to Dos6.22 and Windows 3.11?

Good luck.
 
!bluetonic! said:
Hello to you too.

With any PC issues, it's always better to strip back to find issues.

If this was me, I'd reset the bios settings to default settings and download any DOS based diagnostic utilities and run those. Have a look at Phil's Computer lab website and YouTube channel for such utilities.

Forget about Windows 95 which would run sluggishly on such a machine and maybe look to Dos6.22 and Windows 3.11?

Good luck.
Click to expand...
Ok thanks... I will reset the bios and get my hands on a copy of dos and the utilities.
 
Windows 3.1 isn't the most user friendly to new users, Windows 95 is a lot more straight forward to use. Windows 95 should be ok on that PC if it has 16MB of Ram or more "8MB min" but 16MB recommend. I'd go for latest official version of Windows 95, you will need to create a Win95 start up disk or use a suitable boot disk. There is one called ClearHDD loaded with useful tools and fits onto a floppy disk.

Congratulations on getting given a 486 they are very sort after now.
 
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Retro6 said:
Windows 3.1 isn't the most user friendly to new users, Windows 95 is a lot more straight forward to use. Windows 95 should be ok on that PC if it has 16MB of Ram or more "8MB min" but 16MB recommend. I'd go for latest official version of Windows 95, you will need to create a Win95 start up disk or use a suitable boot disk. There is one called ClearHDD loaded with useful tools and fits onto a floppy disk.

Congratulations on getting given a 486 they are very sort after now.
Click to expand...
Thanks I will get thr clearhdd put onto a floppy
 
Windows 95 just won't install.. I've tried it lots of times, it just locks up at different parts of the installation. I've tried to just install Dos but the pc locks up while doing that as well.
I've returned the bios to default, I've tried with the hdd that came with it and I've tried with a ide to cf adapter using a 2 gb card but the results are the same. The pc will load to the a: prompt using my win98 bootdisk, it loads the driver for the cd drive, I've managed to use fdisk on both the hardrives but then it will just freeze.
The pc recognises the ram, both hardrives, A drive and cd drive but it just seems to freeze whenever it wants to
 
So you have two hard drives? Are they jumpered correctly? If they're on the same IDE cable then one must be jumpered as a Master and the other jumpered as a Slave. If they're on separate IDE controllers then both need to be jumpered as Single (usually the same as Master). Make sure you don't have any RAID funkiness enabled in the BIOS.

Do make sure that the drives are not too large. There were some odd drive limits back in the day. IIRC one of them was that the boot partition could not be larger than 32 MB.
 
Quartz said:
So you have two hard drives? Are they jumpered correctly? If they're on the same IDE cable then one must be jumpered as a Master and the other jumpered as a Slave. If they're on separate IDE controllers then both need to be jumpered as Single (usually the same as Master). Make sure you don't have any RAID funkiness enabled in the BIOS.

Do make sure that the drives are not too large. There were some odd drive limits back in the day. IIRC one of them was that the boot partition could not be larger than 32 MB.
Click to expand...
I should have said I've tried both harddrives one at a time not together, sorry... the one that came with it after fdisk it says 512mb and the compact flash card seems to work as well, the pc recognises it at least. The jumper on the original is set to master.
I'm just wondering if the locking up could be a power supply issue or maybe I'm just clutching at straws... modding retro consoles is my thing really but I fancy getting back into the old point and click pc games since I've been given the 486... thanks for your help
 
4poosaday said:
I should have said I've tried both harddrives one at a time not together, sorry... the one that came with it after fdisk it says 512mb and the compact flash card seems to work as well, the pc recognises it at least. The jumper on the original is set to master.
I'm just wondering if the locking up could be a power supply issue or maybe I'm just clutching at straws... modding retro consoles is my thing really but I fancy getting back into the old point and click pc games since I've been given the 486... thanks for your help
Click to expand...
It sounds like it could be a hard drive issue if its freezing on installations. Using CF cards as hard drives have also been known to give issues. I would also try a different hard drive cable just encase its the cable causing the issue.

Get a can of compressed air on the connectors. cleaning contacts with IPA can sometimes help as well.
 
Just tried a different cable but same outcome. It's only seeing the cf card as 512mb now, I've tried the original harddrive with a different cable and it still locks up... thanks for the help on here from everyone, much appreciated
 
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