Packard Bell PCs

Packard Bell Master Restore CD

/ by mark | Leave a comment

After installing a new 4GB CF card as HD replacement in the Packard Bell Platinum 2220, I’m attempting to restore the original Windows 95 OS with Packard Bell extras from the Master CD

Archive.org has a great collection of original Packard Bell install discs, the Windows 95 group is here: https://archive.org/details/windows95mastercd

My first attempt is with the “170889 – Win95 (Jan 1997 – Platinum Pro) – VM.ISO” disc, which I’ve kept a local copy of online here: https://xyplex.net/files/Packard_Bell/Master_CDs/

Install notes:

  • This generation of PC doesn’t support booting from CDROM, so a boot floppy is needed. The boot floppy image is osboot.img in the root folder of the CDROM
  • The boot floppy has CD-ROM detection and drivers for various CD-ROM drives that PB used. However, our original CD-ROM drive isn’t working and I’ve replaced it with a newer generic IDE ATAPI CD-ROM drive which isn’t recognized by the boot floppy. To workaround this, I copied the generic OAKCDROM.SYS driver to the floppy and edited the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to use this driver. [more details to come on how to do this]
  • After my first install, the hard drive did not boot. I booted back to the floppy, ran fdisk, and had to set partition 1 to be the Active partition.
  • Windows 95 COA (Certificate of Authenticity) code needs to be entered in Win95:
    • Packard Bell COA Product ID: 35296-OEM-0017501-47172
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