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Home / Other I-Appliances / Gateway/AOL Connected Touch Pad Frustrated! Booting.

Frustrated! (modified 0 times) KWGeorge Profile | Email I am so frustrated mabey someone can help me here. I am trying to get my Touchpad to boot 98SE, ive read every message and tried all the different sujestions but no worky. Ive tried with a 128Meg Flash and now today im working with a 1Gig Microdrive. All I can get is the Gateway logo or "Non System Disk" If I run fdisk and view the Partition on the Microdrive it shows to be active. Ive tried running SYS to the Drive and everything else I can think of. No software other than fdisk will even show me the Partition IE: Partition Magic 7, Ranish Partition Manager, etc. They all just show the Hard Drive in the Laptop. Ive tried USB Flash readers as well as PCMCIA to Flash Adapters but nothing works. All I get is the Stupid Gateway Logo! (Starting to hate it).. What is the Trick to this? Ive seen that other people have used microdrives! What am I doing wrong? :( 04-14-2002 11:20:56

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) BigDog Profile | Email Sounds like you need to formt it as a system disk. Once you get the partition created and active, format it with the FORMAT D: /S {Assuming D: is the drive} The message "non-system disk" means that the computer recognizes the partion but their isn't a properly formated boot drive, if you you weren't getting the partition active or created you would get "invalid disk" I would guess you are doing the partitioning and formating on a notebook PCMCIS adapter for the CF drive? You will need to do the partioning and formating in another computer. 04-14-2002 14:14:41

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) KWGeorge Profile | Email Well thats the thing.. The CF Drive will only work with a CF adapter. I dont have and IDE based reader just a USB and the PCMCIA ones. Windows ME wont let me do a SYS on the device. Im just at a loss as how to do this with out incuring more expense. 04-14-2002 21:04:17

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) BigDog Profile | Email You could try a USB CF adapter, they are fairly inexpensive and you can get them at Office Depot or Cirucuit City for around $20-$30 I use a IDE to CF adapter like this one http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1346451642 04-15-2002 05:26:52

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) scooter Profile Arghhh, Seems you and me both are going insane here. I have a working 256MB CF with compressed drive on it. I've tried everything imaginable to copy it to a 1GB Microdrive including the USB and PCMCIA routes. I've gotten Disk Error and the Non-system disk messages and even one that asks where COMMAND.COM is with an A> prompt Any ideas from anybody? After all I did get the CF working. 04-15-2002 08:00:58

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) KWGeorge Profile | Email Well after spending way too much time on it last night I have come to some conclusions. First off I think I should have purchased the 340Microdrive instead but since there was only $20 difference between it and the Iomega 1Gig I went for the larger. Both are made by IBM my research shows. I found that on Windows 98SE, even though the drive showed up being 1 Gig when fdisk was run it would show only 20Meg for a partition. I used every partition program I could find and almost all of them would not even recognize the Micro drive. I wiped out my laptop (Ill pay for that later reloading everything) and installed Windows ME. Now it had no problem seeing the drive and Partition Magic 7 now worked and allowed me to set the drive Active with the full 1 GIG. I tried every type of image software and OS copying tools to no avail. No mater what I did I received "Non System Disk" errors on the Gateway with the 1Gig Micro drive. I then tried the same procedure on the 32Flash that comes with the Gateway but I XCOPY'ed a Boot disk to it. Now the Sucker booted! I was sitting there looking at a A: prompt! So back to square 1. I decided that I would try creating a FAT 16 Partition on the Micro drive instead of the FAT 32 since that was only the real difference between that and the Flash module. This did noting but produce the same boot error. My Conclusion: I feel that the problem here is in the way the Gateway looks at the Micro drive and sets up its geometry. Very much like taking a Hard drive from one system to another where its CMOS setting are slightly different. You receive the exact same errors. I guess what needs to happen with this is simple, 1) Micro drive gets installed to my IPAQ Palm. 2) I purchase the header and Cable needed from Badflash and install a laptop drive. A flash module ethier of 256Meg or even 512Meg is too small to do anything I want, compressed or not. I hope I do not see the same type of problems with the Hard Drive! My reason for this long message with a basic overview of my trials is to hopefully help anyone else who tries this before they spend the money. 04-15-2002 09:34:36

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) scooter Profile Well KWG.., I guess that's good news for you at least. My plan is to make the 1GB the boot partition and grab an external USB harddrive and use that for mass storage. I must have spend about 15 hours so far formatting, copying, try boot, reformat, etc. I really want this working the way I want it. I tried the USB via Win2K and Win98SE and my laptop has a CF slot running Win2K. The Win2Ks see the 1GB partition. I'm not giving up yet. 04-15-2002 12:02:33

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) SiliconIce Profile I used a Win95 system with a PCMCIA-MicroDrive adapter, didn't work on my 98 machine for some reason...I sysed the MicroDrive in DOS, copied cabs to the MicroDrive, and put it in the GWCTP. I used 98lite to install. 04-15-2002 16:50:14

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) yellow2 Profile | Email Tough break guys, but these things are sometimes hard to troubleshoot. Seems you've tried everything under the sun too ! Did you try format /mbr ? Sometimes that works miracles ! Another thing you might try is formatting your drive in a digital camera, that also sometimes works miracles ! 04-15-2002 17:01:22

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) Spanqboy Profile ?? Has Anyone Been Able to make a bootable Microdrive ?? If so, please provide the details (especially the type/manufacture of CF reader) on how you accomplished this Truly Amazing Feat!!! For me, I've tried the following hardware: USB CF/SM Combo Card Reader (Unknown/Win98SE) PCMCIA Card Reader (Microtech CF+II/Win98SE, Win95B) Here's the secret ritual I performed in my vain attempts to create a bootable microdrive: FDISK (create new partition on disk 2) REBOOT (just cuz I like to sit around waiting for Windows to boot) FORMAT D: /S Fire-up RANISH (2.4) to set the disk's partition bootable. (F5 -> B -> F2 -> ESC) RESULTS The USB reader was a complete failure. Didn't work for either the microdrive or the stock 32mb CF card. The PCMCIA reader (using my Fujitsu Point 510) did work for making the stock 32mb CF card bootable. But it did not work for setting up the microdrive!!! Any help would be greatly appreciated by myself and any other knucklehead who tries this in the future!! Spanqboy sends... 05-29-2002 21:56:08

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) jsnorman Profile | Email I can add to your collective frustrations ... after completely messing up my ide header trying to solder it on myself, I am resigned to using the cf port. I did in fact successfully boot to dos a 340MB Microdrive, simply by booting to win98, and doing a format x: /s. BUT, then I sold the microdive because 340 was not enough for me and bought a 1GB microdrive. Since then, my GCT is a useless hunk of metal. I am convinced that it must be a drive geometry problem too. Anyway, I tried using GRUB, installed to the CF card under linux. I created one 900MB primary partition for windows, and a 100MB partition for /boot/grub using ext2 format. Installed grub to the mbr, and setup menu.lst to boot the primary partition via chainloader for windows. I was very hopeful, but no love so far. There are some settings in GRUB for different drive geometry settings. I will play with these to see if I have any luck. Also, I just bought from Advantech the CF-->IDE adapter. Unfortunately, I cannot test it because I need a straight through 44pin notebook ribbon cable which I have ordered (it comes with a 40pin standard IDE cable -- but I do not want to use that because the power requirements for a standard 3.5" IDE drive would likely kill the GCT and I do not want to get a second power supply involved). Until one of these things works, I am stumped. JSN 06-20-2002 16:16:51

RE:Frustrated! (modified 0 times) scooter Profile Anybody get lucky with the 1GB Microdrive, if so how? I'm trying WinME and everything I've tried so far gets me isk error Press any key to restart Where's the any key? Just kidding, amazing I still have at least a bad sense of humor 02-12-2003 09:11:34

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