Does anybody remember these old computers? Need to access BIOS to reassign IRQ, having hardware conflict... Bought an older Gateway 2000, 486 notebook, running Win3.1 and unable to access BIOS. Followed advice to hold F2 key when booting up. It worked! However... Message reads: "System software not found on hard drive. Please run BIOSxxx to restore...." No user guide or tech support avail from Gateway. They no longer have info on their web site for these machines, too... BIOS mfg is System Soft, 80486 82C465MV Ver1.01 System Soft recently sold to Insyde Software Would appreciate any help out there!

It sounds like it's one of those boxes that have part of the Bios on a small partition on the hard drive. The partition might have been wiped out or the drive might be bad. I would load a floppy and run fdisk. Fdisk /status should display the partition status and give you an idea if the drive is working at all.

what is model # of laptop david

Model: Gateway 2000 read the fine print please!

Grok, I'm going to assume that you are too young or are from the part of the world that Gateway setup. Gateway 2000 was the company name. When the year 2000 rolled around, the name no longer sounded futuristic. So they dropped the 2000 bit

I have a Gateway 2000 Handbook 486, and I get the same message you do ("System software not found on hard drive. Please run BIOSxxx to restore"), with "F1 to continue" following. To get into the BIOS, I press the Fn key (blue colored lettering on the key - the key is located at the bottom left hand portion of the keyboard) and the Esc key at the same time. " Need to access BIOS to reassign IRQ, having hardware conflict..." In my BIOS, there are no options to assign IRQs. Good luck.