I recently acquired an older Packard Bell computer and want to tinker around with it. I would like to know how to work the dos program and the windows 3.1. Program. I know this sounds dumb but I think there are 3 harddrives in the system. A:,B:,C:,D:,and E: c,d,and e are all hard drive modes. WHY? Any help from anyone would be appreciated.

What would you like to know. If I don't know, I might bable to find out. Is there a cdrom. If there is, that would be E:. You could have one big harddrive partitioned in to two are three drive. Email me

Steve, We all start somewhere, and asking for help is the best place. The drives you have listed are A:(3 & 1/2 in floppy), B:(5 & 1/4 inch floppy), C:(hard drive, 1st partition) D:(hard drive, 2nd partition) and E:(either hard drive, 3rd partition, or CD-ROM). The reason for so many partitions, on older computers, was because with one large partition, a lot of disk space was wasted, so it was general practice to try to keep each partition below 512MB. This is because of how DOS allocated clusters when writing to the hard drive (long story). Please understand, I'm only guessing, somebody may have installed a second hard drive at some point, and that may be your D: drive. Let me ask you this, and answer me here, or email me, either way....when your system first boot up, it'll print out some cryptic looking codes, but one of them will say something about the BIOS date...it might be Phoenix Bios, or AmiBios...but if you could give me the date, I can tell you a bit more. Also, if you go into your CMOS (usually hit during boot), you'll be able to see how many hard drives are actually installed. Also, what kind of computer? 486? 586? 386(gasp)? Gimme some more info, I can tell you whatever you need...hope this helps a bit.. Perry

wow...what happened there? hit the delete key during boot up, that usually works for Packard Bell computers, it'll take you into your CMOS settings. You can see what hard drives are installed, you can also get your BIOS type and date from here. Don't know why those entries are lined out in the other comment....

I wouldn't reccommend that; sending a newbie into the Cmos is a real good way to screw things up.